Have you ever felt like coding was just for English-fluent, non-disabled Westerners who grew up with computers?
Yeah, us too.
This isn't an accident. Since the dawn of computing, programming languages have been designed and built by mostly the same group of people — mostly white, cis, English-speaking men in academia and industry in the US and Europe, and a few incredible woman mathematicians. They did their work in a time of post-colonial, winner-take-all power, and programming languages were a key tool for securing that power.
This history has led to a vision of computation that is primarily about speed, logic, profit, and domination.
This is an injustice. Because computing, for better and worse, now undergirds daily life in visible and invisible ways, and the people who have access to create with it are the ones most like its creators. The rest of humanity remains beholden to this power, because imagining anything different requires literacy, gatekept by language barriers, accessibility barriers, economic barriers, and inequities in public education.
Wordplay aspires to help change this. It's a programming platform designed to be global, supporting all of the world's languages, but also be about the world's languages. A platform on which everyone can create, with whatever abilities they have, to share interactive content that anyone can experience. For youth and young adults who want to express themselves through interactive words, emojis, and typography, playfully and artfully. Not with the goal of getting power for themselves, but to create a computational world that recognize the incredible strength and necessity of our beautiful differences.
We're a community of designers, educators, and developers trying to bring this vision to life. We are people of color, we are trans, we are queer, we are disabled, we are immigrants, we are refugees. We're centered at the University of Washington↗Information School↗ in Seattle, Washington, USA, a place that aspires to welcome everyone and undo the ableist and racist ravages of colonialism that continue today. Making this programming language and platform is a small part of that mission, offering a glimpse of a future of computing where everyone belongs.
Are you deciding whether Wordplay is okay to use in your school or district? Here's what we can and can't promise.
We are not a company. We're a community-based research project housed at a not-for-profit university, and we have no revenue. That means there are agreements we can't sign, however much we want to help. We can't promise to pay a district's legal fees if it is sued. We can't promise to fix a problem on a fixed schedule. Signing a promise we can't keep would help nobody, least of all you.
Here is what we can promise. We hold the platform to WCAG 2.2 Level AA accessibility, we check it automatically on every change, and we fix what we find as quickly as a volunteer community can. We gather as little about the people who use it as we can, and we use it only to run the platform. Our rights page says exactly what we store, and our source↗ is public, so you can check all of this yourself.
This platform is always changing, and so are the rules you have to follow. If there is something you need that we don't do yet, write to us at [email protected]↗ and tell us about it. The maintainers will read it, and we will write back.