Open Road

One of the most common queries during training sessions with public library staff concerns what web based email service to use for CALD clients. Each web based email service has different options, and may require different strategies. In the following discussion, I’ll discuss how Firefox and certain Firefox extensions can facilitate sending and receiving email in new and emerging languages.

I’ll concentrate on GMail. GMail uses the UTF-8 Unicode encoding and is well suited for sending and recieving multilingual email. GMail, like many internationalized web services, needs to be optimised for minority languages. Optimisation needs to be handled client side. The extend you can optimise GMail is dependant on the capabilities of your web browser.

My preferred platform

Within our projects we have standardised on Firefox 2.0 as our preferred web browser. Appropriate spell checking dictionaries are installed, and we find the following Firefox extensions useful:

• Stylish: useful for controlling and maintaining user specified styles.
• Right Encoding: adds the Encoding menu to the context menu accessible from clicking on the right mouse button.
• Gmail RTL: adds buttons to control paragraph direction in Gmail’s English language interface.
• Dictionary switcher: Allows user to toggle between installed dictionaries automatically or manually.

Using Stylish

When using lesser used languages or minority languages with GMail, it may be necessary to override the default font that is being used to display the email message.

The Stylish extension allows you to define page or domain specific user stylesheets. Stylish can enable these collections of CSS rules automatically or allow you to enable them on demand.

When reading or typing emails in Latin script languages that use combining diacritics, I use the following rule:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document url-prefix(mail.google.com/mail/), domain(mail.google.com)
	{
	table.tlc tr.rr td, table.tlc tr.ur td, div.msg, textarea.tb, div#tt, div#msgs * {
		font-family: "Charis SIL" !important;
	}
}

This would assist with displaying emails in a range of African languages, including Dinka, Nuer, Ife and Yoruba for example. Alternatively, for Myanmar, I might use:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document url-prefix(mail.google.com/mail/), domain(mail.google.com)
	{
	table.tlc tr.rr td, table.tlc tr.ur td, div.msg, textarea.tb, div#tt, div#msgs * {
		font-family: "PadaukOT" !important;
	}
}

Additionally, you could adjust the font size or the leading (line height) used to display the message. A similar approach can be taken with other web services.