Minority or endangered languages are facing a crisis. According to UNESCO, at least 43% of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Even though my grandparents spoke an endangered language and language preservation has been my passion for many years, I only recently understood that fonts—the symbols that appear when you type on a keyboard—play a key role in enabling minority language speakers to digitize and preserve their languages on the internet and in print. Until now, many minority languages lacked fonts.

From billions of readers to very small language communities, the freely available, open source Noto font family from Google Fonts supports literacy for hundreds of languages. The Cherokee Nation, with an estimated 20,000 speakers, uses Noto on phones for texting, email and teaching their language in the USA. Noto is used every day for Tibetan, millions of African users, and hundreds of languages of Asia. The government of British Columbia in Canada, with a population of 5 million people, wanted to cover all their languages, including indigenous ones, in a single font and merged Noto Sans + Noto Sans Canadian Aboriginal into a single font, BC Sans font.

The Noto name comes from the mission, “NO TOfu”—eliminating the tofu-like boxes (???) that appear when no font is available for a user’s text. Noto offers fonts for 146 scripts (writing systems) and over 800 languages, and is opening the door to reading and writing for minority language speakers. Noto is the largest source of fonts for endangered languages. Aligned with Google.org’s support of the Endangered Languages Project and Google’s private sponsorship of UNESCO’s International Conference Language Technologies for All, the Noto project is Google’s ambitious Unicode font project, aiming to continually support 100% of all Unicode characters each year with fully functional fonts. Noto won the Beazley Design Museum Designs of the Year award in 2017.

Noto, which has been in development since 2012, recently updated its page on GitHub. The new home at github.com/notofonts has one git project per script, with all sources either available in the widely supported Unified Font Object (UFO) font source or using the .glyphs format. We also have a new on-demand build system triggered as soon as someone updates a font source that uses the Google Fonts open source ‘fontmake’ compiler. This means Noto fonts are now more truly open source, will be better documented and available for contributions by many more people.

Digitizing endangered languages

A font and a keyboard to type it are critical needs for languages in the digital era, but the most important thing is Unicode support.

Type design is the discipline of creating physical or digital typefaces, the coherent collections of letterforms that today are more commonly referred to as fonts, which are the digital representations of type. With fonts, communities can digitize written documents, publish cultural and religious texts online, or teach their children with digital media. This digitization process saves knowledge, and enables connections and communication across generations. It allows people to keep connected with their villages and family, even if they are physically far away. People in an urban diaspora can keep in touch with other urbanites in the same language community, by using the font to produce printed material for posters, educational material, books, newsletters, and so on. Younger generations of language learners can use Noto fonts to learn to read and write in endangered tongues, text and write emails to each other and communicate via social media.

Ultimately, typefaces are a kind of "critical infrastructure" for each culture, a medium to store and transmit emotional tone.

Accessibility

For some communities, the Noto font for their writing system may be the only way to use their language digitally because there are no other fonts available for their scripts. I encourage you to learn about which Noto fonts are available for the languages you care about.

Minority or endangered languages are facing a crisis. According to UNESCO, at least 43% of the estimated 6000 languages spoken in the world are endangered. Even though my grandparents spoke an endangered language and language preservation has been my passion for many years, I only recently understood that fonts—the symbols that appear when you type on a keyboard—play a key role in enabling minority language speakers to digitize and preserve their languages on the internet and in print. Until now, many minority languages lacked fonts.

From billions of readers to very small language communities, the freely available, open source Noto font family from Google Fonts supports literacy for hundreds of languages. The Cherokee Nation, with an estimated 20,000 speakers, uses Noto on phones for texting, email and teaching their language in the USA. Noto is used every day for Tibetan, millions of African users, and hundreds of languages of Asia. The government of British Columbia in Canada, with a population of 5 million people, wanted to cover all their languages, including indigenous ones, in a single font and merged Noto Sans + Noto Sans Canadian Aboriginal into a single font, BC Sans font.

The Noto name comes from the mission, “NO TOfu”—eliminating the tofu-like boxes (???) that appear when no font is available for a user’s text. Noto offers fonts for 146 scripts (writing systems) and over 800 languages, and is opening the door to reading and writing for minority language speakers. Noto is the largest source of fonts for endangered languages. Aligned with Google.org’s support of the Endangered Languages Project and Google’s private sponsorship of UNESCO’s International Conference Language Technologies for All, the Noto project is Google’s ambitious Unicode font project, aiming to continually support 100% of all Unicode characters each year with fully functional fonts. Noto won the Beazley Design Museum Designs of the Year award in 2017.

Noto, which has been in development since 2012, recently updated its page on GitHub. The new home at github.com/notofonts has one git project per script, with all sources either available in the widely supported Unified Font Object (UFO) font source or using the .glyphs format. We also have a new on-demand build system triggered as soon as someone updates a font source that uses the Google Fonts open source ‘fontmake’ compiler. This means Noto fonts are now more truly open source, will be better documented and available for contributions by many more people.

Digitizing endangered languages

A font and a keyboard to type it are critical needs for languages in the digital era, but the most important thing is Unicode support.

Type design is the discipline of creating physical or digital typefaces, the coherent collections of letterforms that today are more commonly referred to as fonts, which are the digital representations of type. With fonts, communities can digitize written documents, publish cultural and religious texts online, or teach their children with digital media. This digitization process saves knowledge, and enables connections and communication across generations. It allows people to keep connected with their villages and family, even if they are physically far away. People in an urban diaspora can keep in touch with other urbanites in the same language community, by using the font to produce printed material for posters, educational material, books, newsletters, and so on. Younger generations of language learners can use Noto fonts to learn to read and write in endangered tongues, text and write emails to each other and communicate via social media.

Ultimately, typefaces are a kind of "critical infrastructure" for each culture, a medium to store and transmit emotional tone.

Accessibility

For some communities, the Noto font for their writing system may be the only way to use their language digitally because there are no other fonts available for their scripts. I encourage you to learn about which Noto fonts are available for the languages you care about.

I was born cross-eyed, and after two corrective surgeries, I thought I could see like everyone else. But I still had trouble driving, navigating stairs, and playing sports. In my late twenties, I learned that I mostly saw with one eye, and I couldn’t see in 3D. This is considered a hidden disability (similar to dyslexia or color blindness), and people with hidden disabilities could go years without knowing why some basic daily activities and interactions with technology are challenging. 

There are millions of people with hidden disabilities and over 2.2 billion people who have a vision impairment around the world, but more than 70 percent of all websites are inaccessible to them. Often, there is a lack of awareness among developers and designers about both the challenges as well as how best to design and code for accessibility.

To bridge this gap, our Material Design team updated the accessibility guidelines on how to  make images more accessible for websites and applications. The new guidelines explain how to write HTML code in the correct order for images to be read aloud by a screen reader, how to write alt text and captions for  sighted and non-sighted people to understand images, and which types of images have to follow accessibility requirements. By following these guidelines, designers and developers can prevent common mistakes that may leave beautifully designed websites and apps difficult to use for people with visual impairments. We’ve started applying these rules to images in the Material Design guidelines, but there's more to do to make the web more inclusive. Here are a few of the key lessons we learned:

Designing and coding should start with inclusivity in mind 

Imagine how someone with a visual impairment experiences your website or app.When text is embedded in images, it may not be read aloud by screen reader software used by people with visual impairments. By implementing captions that describe how the images relate to the topic and alt text to explain the contents of the images, screen reader users will hear what the images are about. 

Designers put images in a specific order on a website, such as a four-step recipe with photos showing what to do for each step. However, if the HTML is not in the correct order, the screen reader will read out the alt text for each image in the wrong order, and the screen reader user may follow the recipe incorrectly.  To prevent such (untasty) problems, we provided visual and text examples of the correct HTML code order.

Not all images are alike

Decorative images such as illustrations of fruit on a recipe website may not have to follow accessibility guidelines because they don’t contain critical information. However, informative images such as the foods in a recipe, should follow the guidelines because they convey information that is relevant to the adjacent text. The updated accessibility guidelines contain information about color contrast, text size, captions, and alt text. Images such as logos, icons, images within a button, and images that are links, benefit from alt text that describes their function and not what they look like.  

Inclusivity helps everyone

Making products accessible means that even people beyond your target users may benefit. Captions help sighted people understand images. Alt text appears when images don’t load, helping sighted users understand what they are missing. People reading an online menu in poor lighting, such as during an electricity outage, might experience a temporary disability. They are more likely to be able to read the menu if it has good color contrast and large text.