Fixing Input Methods for Abugida Scripts
Languages written in abugida scripts are spoken by more than 1.5 billion people, especially in South and Southeast Asia, yet their input methods have clear deficiencies that have been long overlooked. As a result, users of those scripts face more difficulties in international applications, and that in turn can lead to quality issues for those applications. We should replace the current designs of these input methods, which have been heavily inspired by encoding code points and font glyphs, with one that is easier and more intuitive to users, by teasing apart the consonant + vowel(s) phonemes inherent in the script. Initial feedback from implementations based on the phoneme design have been strongly positive, and it should encourage us to explore the full space of this idea for all abugida scripts according to their specifics.