Autocorrect Is Not: People Are Multilingual and Computer Science Should Be Too

Computer science has a language problem--and we are not alluding to programming languages. Many prevalent, flawed views about natural human language are limiting who is in computer science and what people can accomplish with the technology we build. To start, computer science centers around the English language, and that produces technologies that work poorly for many people. As Manuel Pérez-Quiñonesa points out, when developers make assumptions about English as the default language, navigating digital device interfaces can be frustrating, even for a professional computer scientist fluent in English such as Pérez-Quiñones. Poor multilingual or character-encoding support, incorrect cultural norms baked into software, and so on--these challenges confront users all over the world.