I emailed Tombekai Sherman, the only Liberian listed in the Vai
Unicode Proposal, for his opinion on Vai related issues. He is happy
to have me share his response with the list.

"Let me go right on to answering the questions you have forwarded.
Yes, Vai literates who do not read English would not have access to
computers. But more and more people are having computers today and
that is going to increase. I did not use one until 1992, though I
had learned a computer language program ten years earlier.

It will be exciting for Vai people to know that they can use a
keyboard system without any knowledge of the English alphabet. The
indigenous Vai does not want to deal with English alphabets. They
have rejected it up till now. The finding that those who learn to
read first in a syllabic script, find it difficult to accept
phonetic processing of the syllable is also true for Vai. It takes
the average Vai about three months to become literate using the
script. Using the English alphabet could take years.

However, every effort I have made to reduce the number of characters
to enable an inventory for a representation of syllables in Vai
including punctuations, I find myself around a minimum of 200
characters. All of these characters are not used in every piece of
writing. But they are all needed in order to communicate fully at
all times. Old writers who use very minimum characters are difficult
to be understood. 14 rows might produce only about 98 characters,
and one cannot substitute one syllable for another.

However, there are many similar characters in the Vai syllabary. And
this could make this type of keyboard design possible. But I know it
will be a challenge.

Feel free to ask again.

Sincerely yours,

Tombekai"

Could there not be a simple utility such as 'Babelmap' or 'insert
symbol/international character', provided for a writing system? In
the case of Vai it would be a 7 x 36 table which would open beside
the document and input on a mouse click. If the English consonants
and vowels were provided as coordinates it would also act as a
typing tutor. On the other hand if they don't want the alphabet ...

Here is another message re: Africa from Don Osborn, last March, in
the a12n - forum..

http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-
forum/msg00312.html

"Alan Wood's Unicode resources site
(http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/ ) recently highlighted Richard
Ishida's "Unicode character pickers" utility at
http://people.w3.org/rishida/scripts/pickers/ . I'm only now getting
around to looking at it.

The idea behind these pickers is simple - to allow someone without a
specialized keyboard layout or the need to insert-symbol in a
wordprocessor to compose text using extended Latin characters or
certain non-Latin scripts. Of course you will need a font that
supports these characters/scripts, but with them this utility can be
a great help. <snip>

Still, as I looked at them I thought of set of simple online
utilities developed by Tomasz P. Szynalski for typing several
different European languages (and IPA English) - see
http://www.typeit.org <snip>

What would be the possibility of combining aspects of both Richard's
and
Tomasz's work into language-specific or country-specific online
composition
screens for Africa? For example:
* Larger composition screen and smaller characters (Tomasz)
* Choice of font (Richard)
* Key macros (Tomasz)
* A choice of what information would appear upon cursor hover over
the character
buttons

Such a utility on the web would be useful no matter how keyboard
layouts are
developed and software localized."

Suzanne