Back on the Blissymbolics Bandwagon

Coming to the end of my work on automating a business I am starting to set it in motion in the wild and need a project to work on while I’m testing. Looking back over my projects I seem to be drawn back to the bliss symbolics keyboard I was attempting to get up and running.

So plotting out a road map I’d suggest I did something like this;

Keyboard logic

I want to match thirty five characters to a home menu (this compares to a standard keyboard setup for matching to a keyboard going forward). These are to act like a top level grouping of characters. Then  I want to take each home menu character and then relate it back to roughly thirty five characters so the keyboard is two levels deep. I will then write the keyboard character name to each corresponding block on my digital keyboard and if I could pull the language/style of the keyboard attached to the computer to make it correspond that would be ace. All of these menu items will then be ordered in  way that feels relevant.

Visually I will find a way to describe the level of menu that the user is on, the levels are the home menu, then a character menu and finally once a character is selected an indicator menu. This means that three clicks will be needed to produce a bliss character. In the character menu I will write the definition of each symbol on its block and then in the indicator menu I’ll write the modified definition for each character and indicator.

Keyboard Aesthetics

Once I have a logic in place I need to build a overall output component that has a container box for the keyboard in it. From there I need to split that space into thirty five keys that can contain the corresponding characters. These will then need to be drawn into their respective keys and managed so that they always appear in their correct places. Also we need to know which indicators go with each characters as not all go with all characters.

Functionality then needs to be introduced that allows clicking on the indicator menu item and having it type itself into a box. I also will need to build functionality to work with special characters such as space or enter.

Translation

Build a translation function so that as characters are typed and form words these are translated into English or any other language for that matter that is currently used. Display this under the display box with the ability to switch between different languages.

Search

I need to create a search box that allows for the search of characters based on the selected language. Searching will return a list of characters and their definitions that are most closely related and clicking any of them will bring you to that character’s indicator menu. The search could also return complete words to be used, if a word is clicked then it is thrown into the text box whole.

Languages

I need to figure out an aesthetic for selecting languages, perhaps something flag related.

Tests

Begrudgingly I’ll write up a series of tests for this work.

Accessibility

As this is a major component of what blissymbolics is used for I want to look into achieving the highest level of web accessibility for this project including supporting tools for the hard of hearing and poor eye sight.

And after all that, Robert really is your mother’s brother. I’ll throw everything together into an npm package and get started on something else. Currently I’d think this would take me most of the year, so here’s to giving it a go.