African Alphabets of the Bayreuth Cluster (AABC) provides smartphones with keyboards for all common African languages and scripts.
The keyboard layouts take account of the particular phonetic character variants and the respective Latin QWERTY-, QWERTZ-, or AZERTY-order. All characters are subject to their respective definition by Unicode and their adequate adoption by the system. Each keyboard consists of four pages that can be reproduced by a keyboard view on the screen. All keyboards can be used systemwide as well as offline, too. It is indicated if individual fonts or characters may be supported differently (or not yet at all) by the operating system in use and therefore cannot (yet) be displayed by the app.
For the necessary further development of the app the user is invited to communicate his comments to Dr Ulrich Rebstock ([email protected]). This interactive set-up is intended to harmonize cultural authenticity with scientific control of implementation and adjustment of the keyboard layouts. This also includes the selection and integration of language transcriptions and scripts for which hitherto already existing, or newly generated keyboard layouts are to be adopted.
The project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) under Germany´s Excellence Strategy – EXC 2052/1 – 390713894. Idea and concept go back to Ulrich Rebstock who is also responsible for the implementation of the keyboards.
