To make the web a fully open and accessible platform, we need to ensure that everyone can communicate online in their native language. However, there are a lot of technical challenges to supporting the entire world’s languages in written text. Unicode aspires to be the international standard for representing text digitally. Let’s look at some of the decisions that were made when designing Unicode, and some of the amusing quirks that they lead to, as we think of the best way to design digital writing systems that are truly universally accessible.