Build Stuff 2017

Not all languages are written with your standard, old-fashioned alphabets. Some modern languages, like English, are even written backwards: from left to right! Because Western hegemony has shaped the way the modern world has developed, many of the 500 million people that are native speakers of right to left languages deal with switching between writing systems constantly every day. Unfortunately, much of the software we all use makes this experience difficult and confusing.

This talk is an advanced, abstract talk on what exactly makes supporting RTL text, and particularly bi-directional text, so complicated and just why these problems are still largely unsolved in so much of today’s software.

As a bilingual developer, Aaron has been dealing with both LTR and RTL text since childhood.