Wordplay: Accessible, Multilingual, Interactive Typography

Educational programming languages (EPLs) are rarely designed to be both accessible and multilingual. We describe a 30-month community-engaged case study to surface design challenges at this intersection, creating Wordplay, an accessible, multilingual platform for youth to program interactive typography. Wordplay combines functional programming, multilingual text, multimodal editors, time travel debugging, and teacher- and youth-centered community governance. Across five 2-hour focus group sessions, a group of 6 multilingual students and teachers affirmed many of the platform’s design choices, but reinforced that design at the margins was unfinished, including support for limited internet access, decade-old devices, and high turnover of device use by students with different access, language, and attentional needs. The group also highlighted open source platforms like GitHub as unsuitable for engaging youth. These findings suggest that EPLs that are both accessible and language-inclusive are feasible, but that there remain many design tensions between language design, learnability, accessibility, culture, and governance.