TORONTO — In a bid to become more inclusive and maintain favour among Indigenous communities in North America, Facebook Inc. will roll out a font to honour “those who walked before us”.
“Today, we are excited to announce a new way forward for Indigenous people,” said Mike Schroepfer, Chief Technology Officer at Facebook. “Before social media, before the smartphone, and before telecommunications, there they were. It was wireless communication in its purest form, and they didn’t even have a data plan for it. Truly they were a smart group of people.”
Facebook is able to support over 100 languages and has just recently begun foraying into Indigenous dialects, albeit with not much success. But with the amount of Indigenous employees at their company exceedingly below the zero mark, they have found an adequate compromise with the new “Smoke Signals” font.
“We do not have much resources to dedicate for hiring experienced linguists,” said Schroepfer. “So our team of dedicated software engineers came up with a novel solution, which is to allow them the opportunity to talk to each other the way their ancestors did. Our team is quite astute when it comes to historical accuracies.”
Sharing is caring:
0