3 years ago almost nobody in the US knew what a character encoding was and used "ascii" to mean text.

Now locales and character encodings are understood and planned for by the average web developer. Its all part of becoming global and I definitely put a lot of effort into educating developers.

It has to be done again and it should start with someone like Yahoo setting an example. Because lots of developers (us included) used Yahoo's foreign sites as examples on how to represent different languages on the web.

Its an awareness thing.

Mind you - I'm more motivated than most and I've built some software for my blind grandmother to track stocks (originally over compuserve, latest uses Yahoo's spreadsheet download service) and read them out loud.

I myself still don't exactly know how to do good websites for blind people. If I did, I'd work harder at making sure I conformed.