News - Te reo Maori on the portal

Te reo Māori on the portal

September 2002

The core business of e-government, delivering information electronically, presents a few challenges that come up time and again. One shared by many countries that don’t have ‘mainstream’ European languages is showing accents and other special characters consistently on a mix of browsers, operating systems and available fonts.

The macron of te reo Māori – one of the official languages of New Zealand – is recommended by the Te Taura Whiri i te Reo Māori (Maori Language Commission) and frequently used in printed government documents. In the online world, macrons are far less common.

Each of the options available to show macrons has some drawbacks, which the portal development team have been weighing against the need to make information on the portal as widely available as possible. Working with Te Taura Whiri and Te Puni Kōkiri, a solution using Unicode has been adopted.

Tests using a wide variety of browsers on different platforms found surprisingly good support for Unicode, which is fast becoming an Internet standard. It is likely that Unicode handling of macrons will be incorporated in the next version of the Government Web Guidelines.