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I was in W4A conference in Beijing between 19 and 23 of April. What was really exciting was a demonstration from Charles Chen from Google who showed how the combination of ARIA markup, screen reader and a translation bot will overcome the language differences.

What they did in Google was first to inject ARIA markup in gmail chat. ARIA is a standard which enables Assistive Technologies (AT) to access the content of Rich Internet Applications (RIA). In the case of gmail chat the a screen reader will be notified for new lines in the chat and will read them loud. Charles and his colleague T.V. Raman have combined the ARIA markup with translation bots. A bot is a program which can be invited in the chat. The translation bots developed at Google read the input from the gmail chat and use Google translation services to translate the text. Then the bot posts the translation at gmail chat. Now interesting thing happens: the screen reader reads the translation. It is like the one side posts in English and then it is read on the other side in Chinese. This demonstration was very successful.

A day before the demonstration an interesting real life situation proved the usefulness of Google translation service. I was in a hotel where nobody spoke English. I needed to get my shirt ironed. The hotel offered such service but nobody could understand me what I needed. In the end I asked the service boy to come upstairs in the room where my computer was. Then I went to Google translate and used the service to translate my question in Chinese. It worked! I got my shirts ironed the next day.

Web 2.0 is really a life hack! When solving Web Accessibility problems we get much more than accessible web content - we get machine-readable content which is the basis for more advanced programs applicable in everyday life.