ScriptKey: An Image-Based Keyboard for Unencoded Alphabetic Scripts

Gabriela Arredondo, David Rosado, Megan St. Hilaire, Eve Washington

For languages that are not supported by Unicode, speakers are dramatically limited in their ability to communicate and preserve their language digitally. It requires a large community-driven push for an under-resourced script’s users to begin the long process of seeing their script adopted by Unicode—a process that requires records of the language in use, something to which endangered languages are especially likely to not have easy access.

Thus, we decided to work on creating a tool that allows for digital records of language use to be generated, as well as provide a day to day function for users who would like to communicate in their preferred scripts through digital means, when they previously would have had to resort to using another script or relying on calling or voice messages.

Our proposed tool focuses on allowing users to create messages in under-resourced scripts using image representations of characters and save them as images to be used elsewhere digitally. This allows script users to embed their script into their digital lives and, if they choose to begin the process of encoding, establish an archive of digital interactions to support the encoding process, image recognition, font creation and more.