Preserving endangered languages with Noto fonts

Accessibility

The ability to read minority languages digitally via text magnification improves the accessibility of both historical and modern content in these languages. Languages and their scripts are important to me because I am multilingual and an endangered language activist. While I was preparing the documentary film,

Saved by Language

, about a boy who saved his life in the Holocaust by speaking the endangered language of Ladino/Judeo-Spanish and my

TedX talk

on preserving endangered languages with music, I had to read through many old printed materials from a century ago. Since I am partially blind, it was difficult to read the small text with dense typography on discolored paper. If these documents had been digitized and users could easily use zoom mode to read on a computer or device, they would be more accessible and useful to everyone. Unicode fonts, such as Noto, resolve the problems that previously existed when minority language communities had to publish images of text without Unicode encodings. These images were not readable by screen readers and would often be hard to read when enlarged.

from Hacker News https://ift.tt/3foJvdj