Accessibility

The word accessibility is usually used by the vision impaired to discuss making reading easier for them.

In this case, I am speaking about accessibility for people who do not read Chinese. I just saw Cloudwu's posting about skynet on the Lua mailing list. What an interesting project. But there was barely any English in the readme, and a google search on "skynet game framework" or "skynet game" yielded no results. I almost gave up trying to learn more about skynet, but this really interests me. Then I decided to view the github repository in Google translate, and suddenly a world of interesting things appeared. What seemed like a few short comments in Chinese got expanded into detailed lengthy documentation with many useful links.

I figured out how to access your content, but the readme may have lost many non Chinese. I speak Japanese, and have studied Chinese, so kanjis do not scare me away, but for many Americans and Europeans, it does scare them away. We are so used to important software being in English, that we could easily ignore this package. We are just not used to Chinese software. This is literally the first software package I want to use which originated in China.

I do see that China is a rapidly rising technical and economic power, and fully expect to see way way more software projects coming out of China. You do have some interesting cpus. In fact I am sure that there are already more projects there I should know about, but because of the language barriers, I just have not heard of them. I wonder if there is a good English language blog about the Chinese software industry.

There are a number of things you could do to make your readme more acceessible. A link at the top saying google translation to English would go a long way. Maybe saying that most of the documentation is in Chinese, but that Google translate works great would also help. A few hints that sections are first in Chinese then in English would also go a long way.

And my warmest greetings to all of the Chinese on this mailing list. There is so much anti-Chinese propaganda in the news. Many of us see through it, and know that most of you are peace loving and cooperative just like most of us.

If any one wants to do a Chinese English language exchange I would be most happy to participate. I am a native English speaker living in the Central European time zone.