Type Right: Examining the Underlying Causes of Common Typeface and Font Errors for Indigenous Orthographies, and a Possible Path Forward

Despite considerable typographical innovations over the past twenty years that have enabled and facilitated typing capabilities for many Indigenous language orthographies, typographical errors continue to disproportionately affect Indigenous languages. These include errors in glyph shapes, which impact legibility, and issues with glyph positioning, which impact readability. In this article, the glottalization accent mark is used to demonstrate how such errors manifest in various widely used typefaces. Through a case study of the glottalization accent mark, we identify the root causes of common typographical errors, stemming from the Unicode Standard, which provides the code structure for digital typing, and from the typeface design methodology used to create most of the typefaces available to Indigenous language communities. Many Unicode characters used by Indigenous orthographies lack rigorous and precise semantic definitions, leading to inconsistencies in glyphs created through a language-agnostic typeface design process that does not require designers to be familiar with the specific orthographies for which they design glyphs. To address these issues, we recommend that Unicode revisit the character semantics of Indigenous orthographic elements to create more robust semantic definitions and that typeface designers use a community-partnered design methodology that engages with the goals of language reclamation and revitalization.