Understanding language choices in software
I'm working on a passion project, tentatively called "Barriers of Babel: How Languages and Accessibility Intersect." Today I had a minor breakthrough. I had spent a few days trying to understand which human languages Windows and Android support. I thought it was a matter of matching the language name, and sometimes the region and script, to the IANA language subtags . Then I looked at the NVDA screen reader. It's more transparent than other software, telling us the IANA language subtags of its UI languages. Yet even here it's still hard to know "which languages it supports," because several of these are in fact macrolanguages which contain more than one language. When the IANA language registry says two things are distinct languages, it's based on a measure of intelligibility between them. So for example, what do the macrolanguages "Chinese" and "Albanian" mean in NVDA's list of UI languages ? "Chinese (Simplified, Ch