'Visual literacy' as challenge to the internationalisation of interfaces

Abstract

Following a social semiotic approach, this paper questions the Western cultural assumptions underpinning the web's evolving navigational conventions, and investigates to what extent a group of South African students command the currently dominant Western conventions. South African students (both novices and experienced web users) completed a series of visual exercises, where they interpreted a set of interface and conceptual conventions in common use on the web. Conceptual questions attempted to address to what extent students were familiar with and able to reproduce the conventional Western visual design resources for representing classificational taxonomies or 'tree structures' and various other visual devices for the implicit portrayal of hierarchical information structures (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). Interface questions probed student recognition of common web icons. Some broadly cultural factors were found to explain at least some of the variation in the group. Finally, we consider the implications of our study for training, design, and the diverse range of South African representational resources.

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