This project, funded by Labex EFL, brought together some twenty participants on December 13 and 14, 2018, on the CNRS campus in Villejuif, members of the IDEMI-AFRICA collective from the African diaspora, IT developers, and linguists from the LLACAN laboratory (Language, Languages and Cultures of Africa).
Four themes were proposed to participants: (1) centralizing information to find sources in and on African languages, with links to existing resources; (2) designing an online video game to help children in the diaspora learn African languages; (3) translating the Firefox browser into Yoruba to enable people who understand neither French nor English to use this online browser, and to produce and enrich the web with "technical" terms in Yoruba; (4) developing a keyboard that takes into account the signs of African languages and can enable them to be entered digitally.
Project 4 won first prize from the jury. Its aim was to develop a keyboard with African language characters for PCs and cell phones. This project has been completed, along with those under themes 1 (https://idemi.africa/repertoire/) and 3 (https://support.mozilla.org). Idemi-Africa continues to promote the presence of African languages on the Internet. For more information, visit https://idemi.africa/.