In order to localise to a particular market, designers need to know about its preferences, likes and dislikes, so they can provide cultural metaphors , real world representation of the user interface objects, and also eliminates any culturally offensive material.

The importance of cultural effects on the perception of the content of a website has been discussed in the literature. The interface design is the most important element that the users see and interact with.  Previous work by Evers and Day (Evers and Day, 1997) (based on the Technology Acceptance Model after (Davis, 1993)) has indicated that culture does indeed influence interface acceptance. 

Issues like colours, graphics, signs and placement of web elements may have different connotations for people in different parts of the world. Audiences may differ in age, educational level, ethnic and religious background. In the future users might be able to use a personal user interface as described by Yeo (Yeo, 1996) or similar. As well as functioning properly, the website should be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, regardless of location, language, business practices, or cultural issues. For a website to be usable, the surface representation must correspond to something that is well known to the user. Some icons  that are meaningful in North America may not be appropriate for other countries.

The existing guidelines, methods and tools are steps in the right direction; however, most studies of usability have taken place within North America and to a lesser extent in Western Europe. Hence they need to be broadened to meet the challenge of a global environment. What is needed is a framework to help designers/developers and/or evaluators to assess the usability of a website. This framework must consider all the factors (challenges) that are involved in the process of localising websites.  For a website to be successful outside North America, the designers must be aware of the factors that will ensure it is acceptable to other cultures. This research aims to identify such factors and construct a framework that will help in the design of a culturally acceptable website. 

This paper explores the main terms under consideration; which are website usability, accessibility, globalisation, readability and cultural difference issues. It starts by defining website usability and highlights its importance, as well as the obstacles in achieving it coupled with the value of usability tools. This is followed by web usability guidelines and their limitations. Similarly, website accessibility definitions, tools and guidelines are explored. It also surveys readability formulas, highlighting their limitations and hence, seeks an alternative procedure in order to produce a text that is readable online. Furthermore, globalisation, cultural difference issues and cultural models are discussed in this context. Particular emphasis is put on the process of localising a website.

1. “Usability rules the web. Simply stated, if the customer can’t find a product, then he or she will not buy it”;
2. “The web is the ultimate customer-empowering environment. He or she who clicks the mouse gets to decide everything. It is so easy to go elsewhere; all the competitors in the world are but a mouse click away” (Nielsen, 1999).

1. ISO 9241-11: “Guideline on Usability”: defines usability in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.
2. ISO 9126-1: “Quality Model”: is concerned primarily with the definition of quality characteristics to be used in the evaluation of software products. It sets out six quality characteristics, which are intended to be exhaustive. These are: Functionality, Reliability, Usability, Efficiency, Maintainability and Portability (ISO 9126, 2002).

Although usability guidelines have proven useful, they still suffer from a number of shortcomings that impede their widespread use and reduce their usefulness. Some researchers have already outlined some of these real limitations (Vanderdonckt, 1999, Nielsen and Mack, 1994, Scapin et al., 2000). The main limitations are as follows: 1) The language used comes from various disciplines (e.g., cognitive modelling, psychology, human factors, ethnography), which may prevent web designers from easily understanding it and applying the guidelines correctly; 2) It is difficult to interpret when and how general guidelines need to be applied during the website lifecycle; 3) Almost all guidelines are based on one natural language (English) and one culture (North American).

1.2    Website Accessibility
Having read about “Usability” in the previous section, the reader might want to compare it with the buzzword “Accessibility”. This section aims to shed light on the term “Accessibility” in order to show the relationship between “Usability” and “Accessibility”. Generally, web accessibility refers to the degree to which web information is accessible to all human beings (e.g. disabled, able-bodied, old and young). That is, the goal of web accessibility is to allow universal access to information on the web, by all people but especially by people with disabilities (e.g. blindness, low vision, deafness, hard of hearing, physical disabilities or cognitive disabilities). In addition, the information must be accessible by automatic machine tools (e.g. site indexing tools, robots). This is nicely explained by Chuck Letourneau (Letourneau, 2003) who defines web accessibility to mean “ … anyone using any kind of web browsing technology must be able to visit any site and get a full and complete understanding of the information and must have the full and complete ability to interact with the site if that is necessary”.

The term accessible design is used to refer to design intended to maximise the number of potential customers who can readily use a website. Accessible design can impact market size and market share through consideration of the functional needs of all consumers, including those who experience functional limitations as a result of ageing or disabling conditions. A functional limitation describes a reduced sensory, cognitive, or motor capability associated with human ageing, temporary injury, or permanent disability that prevents a person from communicating, working, playing, or simply functioning in an environment where other people in the population can function (Monterey Technologies Inc, 1996).

Accessible web design entails ensuring that web pages are "user-friendly" in the broadest sense for all those visiting a site. This includes layout, readability, colour choice and browser-independence, as well as considering the requirements of those using adaptive or alternative technology (Forrester Research, 2003). It is worth mentioning the relationship between accessibility and usability; they are closely related, as they both improve satisfaction, effectiveness, and efficiency of users. But while accessibility is aimed at making the website open to a wider user population, usability is aimed at making the target population of the website happier, more efficient, and more effective. Basically, web usability is about making things more intuitive and user-friendly. Therefore, usability implies accessibility (Brajnik, 2000), where accessibility is defined as “the website’s ability to be used by someone with disabilities”.

The importance of web accessibility can be realised from the following reasonings: “The power of the web is in its universality.  Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect” (Smillie, 2001). “Given the explosive growth in the use of the World Wide Web for publishing, electronic commerce, lifelong learning and the delivery of government services, it is vital that the web be accessible to everyone” (Bill Clinton, 1997, as quoted in (Paciello, 2000)).

In addition to the obvious reasons for making commercial and government websites conform to accessibility guidelines, the available statistics highlight the importance of such effort. Exploring these statistics, it was found that there are more than 750 million people worldwide with disabilities (Computer Weekly, 2001). In the UK alone, there are 1.7 million blind and partially sighted people (UK RNIB, 2002a). In Saudi Arabia, the total numbers of disabled citizens is 720,000, which represents 4% of Saudi's population. In addition, the rate is expected to increase by 5% annually (Riyadh city reporter, 2004). According to the 1995 census, the number of disabled people in Oman reached 31,510 (Ministry of Social Development, 1995). However, the W3C estimates that more than 90% of all sites on the WWW are inaccessible to disabled users  (Boldyreff, 2002). These statistics highlight the extent of effort needed in order to allow the disabled peoples to get the benefit of online information and commercial websites.
We are not all the same (Hofstede, 1991)- “One size does not fit all”, so web designers have to accommodate the differences. “Since most websites fail to accommodate people with disabilities, these websites have to be re-engineered to achieve accessibility.  As we move towards a highly connected world, it is critical that the web be usable by anyone, regardless of individual capabilities and disabilities”-Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the W3C and inventor of the World Wide Web (Computer Weekly, 2001). Moreover, making information accessible to all customers is becoming a critical issue for different reasons, some of which are: 1) fairness to people with disabilities demands that they to have access to information as everybody else does; 2) it is the law in a number of countries around the world such as USA, UK and other European Union Countries; 3) taking into account the large number of people with disabilities, it makes good business sense to meet their needs in term of making all online information accessible to them.

In compliance with all the above, many countries, started putting some effort in this regard. For example, in the USA, the accessibility of information on the web has been well regulated: Section 255 of the Telecommunications Act 1996 regulates the accessibility of Internet Telephony (Federal Communications Commission, 2004). The 1998 Amendments to the Rehabilitation Act (US Section 508, 2009) added significant accessibility requirements for the design of electronic and information technology, including accessible web design.

The European Union (EU) countries, working together, have established the EU Web Accessibility Initiative (Information Society, 2002). Individual member states, for example, the UK, with the “UK Disability and Discrimination Act 1995”, are making great efforts to legalise the accessibility of online information resources. The British government is conducting a “Campaign for Good Web Design”  (UK RNIB, 2002b) to further encourage the effort towards web accessibility.

1.2.1    Web Accessibility Guidelines
Although web accessibility is a relatively new concept it has started getting wide attention amongst the professionals in the field. In addition to individual efforts (Beirekdar et al., 2002, Boldyreff, 2002), the participants can be divided into four categories: Government, Universities, Institutions and Companies (for more details see (Al-Badi, 2005)). There is no lack of guidelines, standards and legislations; however a mechanism for implementing them, in real life, has yet to emerge. The next section discusses tools that implement these guidelines, standards and legislations (for more details see (Al-Badi, 2005)).

1.3    Website Usability and Accessibility Tools
Numerous tools exist to determine whether or not a website adheres to various web usability/accessibility guidelines. These tools can provide useful feedback to the web designers and maintainers. In addition, these tools can assist in the repair and enhancement process of a website. There are websites that provide a selection of these tools with a description of the functionality of each tool(Thatcher, 2002, WEBAIM, 2009, Brown, 2002, Graves, 2001, NIST, 2004, Becker, 2002c, Hower, 2009, W3C, 2002b). Some of the better-known tools are listed by (Al-Badi, 2005).

There are a number of studies on automating the Web usability/accessibility evaluation process, aimed at examining the usefulness and effectiveness of the existing tools. For example, Brajnik (Brajnik, 2000) presented a survey of automatic usability evaluation tools for websites. These tools consider a large set of properties depending on attributes and not on the context of websites. He concluded that, in particular, those tools supporting repair actions have the potential to dramatically reduce the time and effort needed to perform maintenance activities. A recent study (Ivory and Chevalier, 2002) examined the effectiveness of the WatchFire Bobby (Watchfire, 2002), W3C HTML Validator (W3C, 2002a), and UsableNet LIFT automated evaluation tools (UsableNet.com, 2002). They concluded that although the tools helped designers to identify a large number of potential problems, designers were not effective in interpreting and applying the guidelines. Furthermore, the modifications that designers made based on the tools did not improve user performance or ratings.

1.4    Website Readability
Readability on websites should be given high priority. Web documents have very different characteristics from newspaper articles or pages in a textbook. Web designers are required to design web pages that attract surfers, retain and convert them to loyal customer. Readability is concerned with the extent to which a piece of text is easy for the target reader to read.  A proficient reader is likely to be bored by simple repetitive texts. An incompetent reader will soon become discouraged by texts which he/she finds too difficult to read. This is likely to happen when the text contains complex sentence structures, long words, or too much material with entirely new ideas. The term readability refers to all the factors that affect reading and understanding a piece of text. These factors include: the readers interest and motivation, page layout (e.g. foreground/background colour, spacing between lines and objects), text affects (e.g. font type faces, size and styles) etc., the quality of the user’s monitor as well as the actual composition of the website content (Lee, 1999).

Readability formulas (also called readability indices or metrics) were first developed in the 1920s in the United States. For more many years, readability formulas have helped teachers, librarians, and parents match books to students in that country. They used to analyse text and predict which materials can be comprehended by individual readers.  As far as the researchers are aware, there is no equivalent to such formulas for the Arabic language.

Most websites use text as a common way of communication because it downloads quickly and is understood by all existing browsers (Allen, 2002).  Previous studies, research and practitioners in the fields of “web usability” and “writing for the web” found that writing for the web is different from writing for hardcopy (print).  This is due to the fact that people rarely read web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page content.  It was found that 79% of users always scan any new page they come across and only 16% read word by word (Morkes and Nielsen, 1997b, Thomason, 2009, Nielsen, 2005, Nielsen, 1997b) Reading from computer screens is 25% slower than from paper. Web content should have 50% of the word count of its paper equivalent (Nielsen, 1997c, Morkes and Nielsen, 1997a). (Dillon et al., 1992) emphasised that reading on a screen is substantially slower than reading print and accuracy is lessened for cognitively demanding tasks. They also suggested that visual fatigue and reduced levels of comprehension is more likely to result from reading from screen and readers preferred good hard copy (print) to screen displays. There was almost consensus among the usability experts regarding the need for different style of writing when composing a web document. Online documents need to be concise, scanable and objective (Morkes and Nielsen, 1997a). Therefore, experts in the field formulated a set of guidelines for writing for the web. A summary of such guidelines is available in (Al-Badi, 2005).

A readability formula is a method of testing the level of reading skill needed to be able to read a particular piece of text. Readability formulas are mathematical equations that correlate various document features with a standard measure of reading comprehension. The document features can include number of letters per word, number of syllables per word and number of words per sentence. Most of the current readability formulas express the readability level as a grade level or as years of education. However, many researchers believe that the way readability formulas predict the readability of a document is inadequate. As a matter of fact, readability formulas might be counterproductive because they focus the writer’s attention on words and sentences and draw attention away from other readability issues.  Nevertheless, hundreds of readability indexes/formulas exist. Many online resources describe different kinds of readability formulae (Hill, 1997, Nielsen, 1997c, Weitzel, 2003, Miller, 2004). For details see the report in (Al-Badi, 2002, Al-Badi, 2005) highlights the most popular formulas.

1.5    Website Globalisation
When the site audience is the whole world, how can its content be made accessible to the non-American, non-English-speaking people who have different cultural values and expectations? Does the translation of a website from one language to another solve the problem? Becker and Crespo argued that the basis of support for multicultural websites is quite complex and cannot be viewed as a direct translation of textual content from one language to another (Becker and Crespo, 2001). In addition to the inadequacy of the translation, it is also a very expensive process. This is because any changes to the home language site will require that related changes are made to the foreign language sites, so that the translation issues never end. It can involve many types of materials, including technical documents, marketing materials, market research, sales information, product literature, price lists, and even competitor information. Moreover, application server and content management software were initially developed for the monolingual US market and often do not work smoothly with non-English character sets. Such issues are obstacles for international web designers in producing usable localised websites. Therefore, it is not only because translation is expensive and inadequate but also because there are other issues that need to be considered. These relate to culture, real-world experience, language etc. Cultural Difference Issues section later). Such realisation led to the emergence of the term “Globalisation” which is defined below.

1.5.1    Globalisation
“A truly globalised website serves every visitor with the same quality experience regardless of location, language, business practices, or cultural issues” (Izar.com, 2002). The idea of globalisation can be visualised as shown in Figure 1 below.

• Information content of a website should be sensitive to the religious and moral beliefs of the target users.
• Navigation styles and positioning should be sensitive to language and the user’s real world experience (e.g. symbols and metaphors).
• Information content and page design should be sensitive to language directionality of the target users.
• Images and colours of a website should be culturally appropriate to the target users.
• In addition, some common features are important to most cultures for example: 1) the customer services, navigation systems, personalisation, security assurance and accessibility often influence users’ online experience; 2) design consistency improves users’ online experience and hence user satisfaction.

• Know the Target Audience: to fully understand the target audience adopt the framework described in this paper. It is clear that using this framework during the website development lifecycle should lead to a successful outcome. Remember if customers get offended or intimidated once while they are at your website they may not come back again since all the competitors are but a mouse- click away. In addition, an unsatisfied customer may spread the word that this site is poor.
• Usability/Accessibility Tools/Guidelines: Although it was discovered during this research that only limited use was made of usability and accessibility tools and guidelines by designers in both countries, the use of these aids is now recommended by usability experts and in order to comply with government requirements in many countries ((Al-Badi, 2005))
• Culturally Usable Websites: Do not try to design “usable cross-culture” websites, because this approach implies “one-size-fits-all”. This is clearly impossible due to the fact that people’s preferences are different as this research showed. The right approach is to create a “culturally usable” website where designers localise websites for each of the target cultures, taking into account all the overt and covert factors that need to be considered when designing for such cultures.
• Target Users Involvement: As indicated in the enhanced framework, integrating local users into all the design phases will help to create a website that suits them which is also the designers’ objective. Remember that many people can design websites but not many can design successful ones. This involvement would enable designers to avoid crises similar to the “dot com” crisis.
• Design Consistency: Create an exclusive layout and a style for handling website text and graphics which can then be applied consistently to build rhythm and unity throughout the pages of the website. Repetition is not boring; it gives the website a consistent graphic identity that creates and then reinforces a distinct sense of “look and feel” and makes the website memorable. A consistent approach to layout and navigation allows readers to adapt quickly to the website design and to confidently predict the location of information and navigation controls across the pages.  Design consistency issues have been emphasised throughout the different stages of this research for its importance and criticality for creating successful websites.

•  The information content of a website should be sensitive to the religious and moral beliefs of the target users. In this regard, it was noticed that both the Arab users and designers placed great emphasis on the fact that the website needs to adhere and respect the   religious beliefs and moral values of the target culture.
• Navigation styles and positioning should be sensitive to language and the users’ real world experience. It was proved that the directionality of the mother-tongue language influenced of the preference of navigation positioning (left or right hand side). Also it should not be assumed that metaphors are understood in all cultures, e.g. the current symbol for “home” (a simplistic depiction of a red roofed house) is not recognised as such in all cultures who would then fail to understand the “home” instruction.
• Images and colours of a website should be culturally sensitive to the target users. This was clear from the emphasis that Arab respondents placed on the question of human figure being appropriately dressed and their preference for the use of the colour green, symbolic of Islam.
• In addition, some common features are important to most cultures for example: 1) good customer services, navigation systems, personalisation, security assurance and accessibility often influence users’ online experience; 2) design consistency improves users’ online experience and hence user satisfaction. These issues were discovered from the different methods used throughout the research.