IMPROVEMENT OF ENGINEERING WEBSITE FOR CROSS-CULTURAL ACCESSIBILITY AND USABILITY

Websites that help manage and display the content which relates to various fields of engineering have become a significant assistant for industries of engineering. In many cases such websites are developed to address international audience and referred to as cross-cultural websites. The design of such websites is directly connected with improvement of the displayed content and user interface. It is recognized that the design process of cross-culturally usable and accessible websites does not involve just a translation of their content. In this paper methodology that allows improving the website content and design accessibility and usability for international users is introduced. For application case of the developed methodology, engineering website of the Scientific Laboratory of Biofuels initially developed for Latvian users, is analyzed and improved for Japanese users.