For English language speakers the idea that words or characters could not be reproduced on a computer is unthinkable. For many indigenous language speakers, however, this is something that hinders their easy adoption of ICT.

The Venda language, for example, has five additional characters which are not used by any other language. These characters use diacritic marks but most Venda speakers cannot type these so they simply leave them out. In Venda this is critical as it changes the meaning of words. There are ways to insert these characters but they are tedious and frustrate many Venda speakers. The same applies to Afrikaans and to a lesser extent Northern Sotho and Tswana.

These characters are also not easily available to other users, rendering them unreadable. The keyboard includes a set of fonts that allows you to view the correct Venda characters.

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