CAW N 17
French contribution on the areas involved in Cultural Adaptability :

This contribution is not an extensive list of all topics and problems related to cultural adaptability. It does, however, list some of them, proposes principles, methodology and a list of questions to be answered to
by the workshop members, or to be put on a future program of work.

Principles : cultural adaptability needs arise from the necessity to provide EVERYBODY with the tools necessary to be part of the Global Information Society. These necessities, or requirements, have to be listed
(e.g. the correct rendering of local cultural elements), but not the precise ways of fulfilling them, which may and will evolve with the technology.  Two examples :
- software programs must take into account national habits, uses, and "things taken for granted", which vary very much from one country to another ;
- warning messages lose the major part of their impact if they are not written in the native language of the user !

Topics to be covered : Almost every man-machine or machine-machine interface poses critical problems (voice recognition, optical reading of handwriting, pictograms, icons, etc). It is proorposed that the set-up of a comprehensive list of all critical interfaces be a priority item for the workshop, to be continued afterwards.

Topics include also the treatment of languages : translation, terminology, versatile spell-checking programs, with or without grammatical capabilities, the respect of typographic habits, without importing them from one language to another (e.g. Capital Letters everywhere !), the handling of diacritic signs, which have also an influence and a role to play in alphabetical sorting (a and ä are NOT the same letter in many languages). One must not forget that "alphabetical order" is a notion taught at a very early age in all countries, and that users will not be able to cope with tools whose sorting order is alien to them. This is also true for all searching and organising functions linked to keywords (alphabetical order strikes again).

And finally, they include everything dealing with character sets, not only their coding and their content, but also the keyboard design, the graphical rendering (gothic...), and the compatibility of the coding with all functions of the system (file transfer, messaging, security features, etc).   The main problem will be to define where to put the interface between what must be standardised, then public, and what must be left to the initiative of the implementors, then proprietary.

Finally, cultural adaptability does not mean only taking into account the needs of various cultures, but also those of handicapped people (any kind of handicap) and maybe those of various specific professions. These problems are entirely orthogonal to the traditional technology domains, and it is of the most importance that they are treated with coherence everywhere. That, precisely, will be the main task of the technical direction.