What is language?
Language is means adopted by humans to identify surroundings and express interactions among and with these surroundings. It is means used by humans to express their thoughts and feelings. Please note that in this definition, I am not referring to language as spoken or written form. Considering that a language is spoken by most of us, it has sounds that correspond to consonants and vowels. Mixture of these sounds make up syllables, words and sentences. It should be noted that in case of completely hearing impaired, such sounds and correlation of such sounds with words might not exist. They have hand gestures that are corelated to words and sentences.
What is script?
A script is written form of representing language where consonants and vowels get represented by characters, combinations of these form syllables, combination of syllables form words and every word when separated with spaces construct sentences. It is important to understand that scripts allow to represent language in its written format. This could be handwritten or could be in typed format.
What is font?
Font is specifically used in technologies having visual displays. For example, this includes computers and phones, but it doesn’t include braille displays and smart speakers. Font is somewhat like handwriting. Every individual writing the script will have different handwriting which gives different look and feel to the written script. Similarly, when one changes font on computer, the look and feel of a given script can change.
Fonts allows designers to produce variations in styling of a character of a given language script to eventually produce a different look and feel for the same character. This means that a character “T” will look different in “Times New Roman” font and different in “Arial” font.
What is character encoding?
Some might argue that font is more than what has been explained. According to such people, fonts are used to also write different scripts. But I won’t take such fonts into consideration as that is wrong way of providing a script writing ability to an end user. For this, it is important to understand character encoding.
Character encoding simply means sequence of bits and bytes in lines with a given encoding standard that allows to identify a language script character in the digital world. So as ASCII encoding, 8 bits or 1 byte is used to represent a character. With one byte at disposal, we could possibly have 256 characters – good enough for Latin origin languages may be but not enough for Chinese or Japanese languages. That is why Unicode encoding came into existence where 2 bytes are used to represent a character of any language script. Instead of giving us only 256 possibilities, this encoding allowed 65536 possibilities of characters spanning across all languages in the world.
What is keyboard input method?
Within Windows operating system, we can add multiple input languages by going to “Region and Language Settings”. These chosen languages can be changed by pressing Shift+Alt key combination. Similarly, in IOS and Android also, input method languages can be added and selected from their corresponding settings. This is where your keyboard input now tells the operating system to store corresponding language script character using the necessary encoding.
This is the right way of providing end users with right means to input language scripts. Fonts are not serving the purpose when used to type out language scripts. Fonts don’t change the encoding; they just change the appearance. So, by making ASCII encoded “/” as character in Devanagari script is not going to change the “/” character stored in document. To see what I mean, use any such font to type out some text in word document. Then copy-and-paste the textual content in Notepad. You will observe what I mean to say. Try to do the same by changing keyboard input method, and your data stays intact.
What is Braille?
Braille is a script used by blind across the world to represent their native languages in form of dots. First invented by Louis Braille for French language, it was later adopted by other languages. Initial Braille script had 8 dots script which was later updated to be represented in 6 dots. Even today 8 dot script is used by some of the languages.
The six-dot script has 3 vertically arranged dots on left and right of a cell. A cell is rectangular window of a Braille slate which allows to emboss one Braille character. Every Braille character is differentiated by the number of and combination of dots that get embossed.
As Braille characters are to be felt by human fingers, the proximity of dots to one another is fixed at pre-determined dimensions. The cell size and dot spacing is such that all six dots can be felt at once with one fingertip. Braille script has no font size. If there were font size, the dot spacing would get affected and a fingertip would be incapable to identify the character being expressed. To understand the why behind this, try to fetch your debit/credit card, you might have the card number embossed on the card. Try to close your eyes and feel the number with fingertips. Although you can read it with your eyes, you won’t be able to identify the numbers with fingertip alone. This is the same reason why your finger tip fails to identify that small particle stuck in your tooth whereas the tongue can clearly distinguish it.
Conclusion
It is important to understand the difference between language, script, encoding, Braille Script, Sign language script and so on to be able to serve end users using the valid means. Providing users with font-only based solutions is a narrowly scoped approach which may address only sighted end users. Such approach will impact Braille users as well as hearing impaired users denoting wrong set of characters than the ones seen with that font.
Recent Comments