Developing Keyboards for Digitally Marginalized Languages

Track: Technical | T6 |   Everyone |
Wednesday, October 30, 2024, 12:00pm – 12:30pm
Held in: Steinbeck 1 B&C
Presenters:
Craig Cornelius - Google 
Tex Texin - XenCraft
Host: Sheriff Issaka

This talk presents on the keyboards team at Translation Commons, where we design and develop keyboards for digitally marginalized languages, as well as associated processes and training material. Our goal is to improve access to information and communication channels for the thousands of languages currently left behind in an increasingly digital world. Challenges around supporting languages with large character sets while maintaining ease of learning and use, languages that are not yet represented in Unicode, developing word lists for predictive text and communication with non-linguist community representatives are among the topics that make this work particularly interesting and rewarding.

Takeaways

Why supporting digitally marginalized languages is important; What makes this work interesting from a technical, process and human perspective; How to get involved