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Comment by dexwiz | Hacker News Reader

I find it ironic to read an English blog post deriding something for being inaccessible hosted on a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type. I cannot tell if the author is Japanese, but I am not sure it matters since the content appears to be exclusively English.

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> something most English keyboards would not be able to type

English language keyboards are how you type Japanese.

Those keyboards you see with Katakana or Hiragana are rarely used in Japan, pretty much everyone uses romaji.

And it's easy to set up on Windows. I can toggle English and Japanese input with Windows Key + Space.

ナイス！

> And it's easy to set up on Windows. I can toggle English and Japanese input with Windows Key + Space.

It's virtually impossible to set it up if you don't use a QWERTY layout. I have a horrible pile of hacks that more or less work for now, but are being removed in windows 11.

Interesting! I had never tried. Do you know if the Google IME has the same issue?

No idea, I've never used a Google OS on a machine with a real keyboard.

I meant this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Japanese_Input

Thanks, on a brief try that seems to be working!

I think my comment still stands. Without extra configuration, there is no way to type the characters directly from an English Keyboard. And most users don't have that configuration setup. Even if you can type in romaji, it still requires the knowledge of what combination of latin characters correspond to to a Katakana character. I don't think you should have to enable international keyboards to access a domain.

> a domain containing Katakana, something most English keyboards would not be able to type

What browser are you using? Mine (Vivaldi) displays the domain as its standard Punycode ASCII representation:

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com

Here's how it looks for me in Firefox.

https://i.imgur.com/HJxJVJj.png

My Firefox browser shows the punycode as well, potentially something with your configuration? Only Japanese characters that Firefox renders is the name of the tab, URL itself is using the romanized characters.

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