Saturday, February 10, 2018

[fcgqncyr] Typing Latin

What portion of the world (among the subset that uses computers) use computers with keyboards with which it is difficult to type the Latin letters A-Z?  I suspect very few: a keyboard with local orthography will also have additionally marked the Latin alphabet for ease of typing web and email addresses.

What portion of the computer-literate world does not know the Latin alphabet?  By "know", probably something like: given a web or email address in print, they can type it on their computers.  How much of a barrier to access to computing is learning the Latin alphabet?

If the barrier is low, then maybe we don't have to push so hard to do internationalization, at least in some areas.  Inspired by IDN, Punycode, and attacks against it, though domain names are not necessarily a domain we should decrease efforts at internationalization.  If a user remembers only how a website is spelled in the local orthography, he or she will need a search engine to find the ASCII address.  This puts search engines in the position to be gatekeepers.  In contrast, if the user can directly type the address in the easier-to-remember local orthography, DNS is a decentralized system for which it is far more difficult to be a gatekeeper.

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