This is applicable to almost any piece of software with text in it. When starting your new app, you should make sure you are using a separate language file for the strings in your app. This makes text reusable, and you can change it all in one place.

Once your app gains a community, if you did this, you can also get translators!

With Photon i made the massive mistake of hardcoding everything up until the app became massive, and my PR for un-hardcoding all the strings looks like this:

The amount of lines modified in the GitHub PR. 2,067 lines added, 1,082 removed.

It was worth it though! Because the community has translated it into 11 languages!

  • teolan@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    I’m French, so when building any GUI stuff I just tend to start from the beginning with both French and English languages, that way I have a reason for doing this from the start. I’m thinking I should also add Spanish, so that I can keep my admetedly low skills in Spanish.

      • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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        3 months ago

        Unfortunately this is an issue for anyone visually impaired.

        People just do not stop to think how difficult their UX is if people need very large fonts.

          • HumanPenguin@feddit.uk
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            3 months ago

            The issue that layout containers are often unable to display large fonts on the widgets when certain restrictions are enforced in the layout. So, without giving time to try very large fonts. To Many developers never discover their applications just cannot be read by visually impaired people.

            • jimmy90@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              yeah if the UI library is not ready to flow text and UI elements (including wrapping/breaking sensibly) then important information and interactive elements are inevitably clipped/unusable or jumbled beyond recognition