Title:
Making the World Wide Web More Usable to a Wider
World
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
The world has almost seven billion people. At least
two billion are expected to be on the Internet by
January. New growth is mostly from developing
countries. Yet only twenty-one percent of their
population is online. A group called the World Wide
Web Foundation is working to make the Web more
usable to more of the world. Tim Berners-Lee is the
British computer scientist who invented the World
Wide Web. He announced the launch of the Web
Foundation last November.The group says many people
can access the Web but are unable to use it. The
biggest reason is illiteracy. The latest United
Nations report says almost eight hundred million
adults are unable to read or write. Even for those
who can read, much of the information that is
available on the Web is not in a language they can
understand. Tim Berners-Lee first proposed the idea
for the World Wide Web in nineteen eighty-nine. This
was twenty years after Americans developed the first
version of what we know as the Internet. The
Internet is a network of networks. It lets millions
of computers communicate with each other. The Web is
a major part. However, people now often use
applications that are not Web-based, like on social
networks and mobile devices like the iPhone. Tim
Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a way to
help people share information. His early work
brought the Hypertext Markup Language, or HTML, used
to create Web pages. It also gave us the Hypertext
Transfer Protocol -- the HTTP before Web addresses.
By two thousand eight, Google reported that the
number of Web pages had passed one trillion. Steve
Bratt is chief executive of the World Wide Web
Foundation. He says the Foundation wants everyone to
be able to use this information.He says: "Our main
purpose is to advance the Web to empower people."
Partnerships with the Web Science Trust and the
World Wide Web Consortium aim to create applications
that make the Web more user-friendly. Steve Bratt
says mobile technology is an important part of that
work, as more and more people use their phones to go
online. He says: "We have to make the Web a lot
easier to use even on the simplest and least
expensive mobile phones." For VOA Special English,
I'm Alex Villarreal.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
