Django For Half A Billion People
06-05, 15:55–16:25 (Europe/Madrid), Auditorium

Thinking about non-English users is not the first thing that comes to mind when building software, even for non-English developers. You'll be surprised by how simple considerations can highly affect non-English users' experiences. This talk is about UI choices and localization for Arabic users (and other right-to-left languages).


Django powers web applications from all around the globe. English has dominated the tech scene, and that's ok for developers. But it's not that great for the non-English users of those web apps! This talk is about simple and not-so-simple considerations you, as a developer, can take into account if you're building for people around the globe!

The talk will start by putting you in the shoes of the average Arabic-speaking user. We'll go through examples of not-so-great UX—even established web apps have problems!

The talk will then shed light on the two main problems it targets:
1. Right-to-left support.
2. Localization.

Here's a rough overview of the talk's structure:

  • Introduction.
  • How Arabic-speaking users experience the web.
  • CSS logical properties: quick win, high impact.
  • Right-to-left challenges when JavaScript is involved.
  • Fonts: nobody notices them unless they're ugly.
  • Internationalization and localization.
  • GNU's gettext.
  • A quick overview of internationalization in Django.
  • Translating Python code.
  • Translating templates.

Topics

Django Internals, HTML/CSS/JavaScript

Audience Level

Intermediate

Moe

Django developer since 2021 and a new contributor to open-source.