While linguistic access in the digital sphere is a growing concern, many overlook the key role of written scripts in mediating who can fully utilize digital tools. This interview presents the experiences and perspectives of Kamal Mansour, a pre-eminent typographer working to support the world’s scripts with enabled fonts, in conversation with Dr Isabelle Alice Zaugg, a scholar of communication and semiotics who investigates the technical foundations for digital language justice. An enabled font is a key piece of digital infrastructure required to exchange text in a script and the language(s) it represents, thus widening linguistic inclusion in the digital sphere. However, moving written scripts from the page on to the screen also requires multiple levels of technical policy, which represent layered challenges considering that digital architecture is designed around Latin script defaults and a capitalist consumption model that does not take into account the economics of the Majority World. This interview also explores the essential place of typography within the visual culture of language communities as well as the skills and intuition required of typographers as they design culturally appropriate fonts for scripts from unfamiliar contexts. This interview highlights the inspiration and the reflections of one of the most experienced typographers in the world, taking us in-depth into what it would really take for digital tools to enrich the communication ecosystems of all language communities.
Mansour et al. (Thu,) studied this question.