I am currently writing a website for a non-profit organization and would like to provide the respective content there in “easy language” (in German “Leichte Sprache”) as well.
If you have already done this:
What do you see as best practice for implementation?
1 A link in the main navigation “Easy Language”, which then switches from the current page in normal language to its counterpart in easy language?
An established symbol in addition to the “easy language” link text?
2 What is the best URL structure?
The same as for additional normal foreign languages?
So
domain.tld/foo
→ domain.tld/easy-language/foo
domain.tld
→ domain.tld/easy-language
Irrespective of these accessibility issues:
Since I’m new to Kirby: would you use a plugin for multilingualism for this purpose? What could you please recommend? In other words, what method would you use to implement this additional language in Kirby?
My personal recommendation would be: Do not use the built-in Kirby multi-language feature for this. In most cases, Leichte Sprache means that you have separate content with a separate site structure, so there is no 1-to-1 mapping.
Simply use different pages (maybe with different blueprints if necessary). On most sites, the “Leichte Sprache” button does not link to the same site in Leichte Sprache (or there are two buttons, one to the main page of “Leichte Sprache” the other one to the direct “translation”). If you need such a button, use a pages field for that and setup a “relation” of some kind - manually.
The site of the non-profit organization I work on has a very simple structure.
6 pages, no subpages.
My previous plan was to make each of these pages also available in “easy language”. So a 1-to-1 mapping.
Of course, I will shorten content that is very long for the “easy language” version.
From this point of view, is there anything to be said against using Kirby’s multi-language feature?
How do I ensure that the “normal language” variant does not have an addition in the URL?
In other words: as outlined in the initial posting.
Irrespective of this:
I don’t yet know how to deal with the formal content “privacy policy” in relation to “easy language”. The provider “Aktion Mensch” does not offer the content of Datenschutz | Aktion Mensch as “easy language”.
No, I think when the site really has a simple structure, it can work fine. But note that fields that are not “translated”, will fall back to the default language. So you either need to make sure that all fields are filled, or you need to use template logic to exclude such content.
Certainly difficult, especially if you collect a lot of data/use a lot of services. On getkirby.com, we tried to keep it simple without too much legalese, maybe you can get some inspiration from there: Privacy Policy | Kirby CMS
I am not yet clear what you mean by ‘"fields that are not “translated”’, because I am not yet familiar with the very complex options for the panel at kirby.
There are many levels:
blueprints, sections, layouts, fieldsets, field types, field type: blocks, …
In that case, I’d recommend you watch the introductory videos, or skim through our guide.
But what I mean is: Say you have a field called text in your default language German and it contains some text. Now you “translate” that into Leichte Sprache, all good. But if you think: Hey, I don’t need this field in my “Leichte Sprache” translation, and you leave it empty, then by default Kirby will fall back to the content of that field in the default language (unless you prevent it using conditions in your php template). I was just mentioning this to keep it in mind when voting for the option to use the translation feature for “Leichte Sprache”, because “Leichte Sprache” is not a 1:1 translation, but rather summarized content to keep it simple.
For a simple website, where each page consists basically of just a main text field (maybe even using blocks) with some meta data/image fields, using the translation feature can indeed work fine. For complex page structures with lots of fields that you would not include in the “Leichte Sprache” version, I’d rather not use the translation feature.