Enhancing blog readability for non-native english readers in the enterprise

Abstract

Blogs are an important platform for people to access and share information, particularly in corporate settings where users rely on these systems for their work. However, because a global enterprise is multilingual, not all employees can understand the shared information in these systems easily if the content is written in a user's non-native language. As a result, this research focuses on enhancing the readability of blogs in enterprise social software for this group of users. The pilot user study of Japanese and Chinese bloggers suggest there are two main challenges: finding an interesting blog post to read and encountering difficulties in reading blog posts as currently rendered. Based on these findings, we designed and implemented a Firefox extension, Clearly, which uses web customization techniques to improve these two levels of readability issues.