night owl

Taken from a stepladder putting up Christmas lights

“Brewing Storm on an Evening Commute”

And “Finally, no Power Lines”

There are! Not many, but public facing bodies in Wales have started doing it.

So, for the most part, it is possible to just use any old font designed for English. Welsh has three main differences that pose a greater or lesser amount of difficulty for an English font, to whit:

We do not use the letters K, Q, V, X, or Z. (We didn't used to have J either but we nicked it and we're not giving it back.) Not a problem, those are just extraneous.

We have extra letters, all of which once upon a time had their own glyphs; but, the printing press meant these were lost. Instead, they're now what we call diglyphs - a letter seemingly represented by two letters. These are Ch, Dd, Ff, Ng, Ll, Ph, Rh, and Th. Not a serious problem, but word processors do count these as separate letters rather than diglyphs, so context-sensitive.

The to bach - in English, the circumflex. When Welsh needs to differentiate between long and short vowels, it uses a circumflex over the long ones: â, ê, î, ô, û, ŵ, and ŷ. This one is frequently a problem, particularly for ŵ and ŷ.

So, for the most part, you can get by with standard fonts, with the caveat that the circumflexes can be tricky. But:

In 2017, the Welsh Government commissioned a Welsh-specific set of typefaces, and the result was a trio of fonts called Cymru Wales Sans, Cymru Wales Serif, and Cymru Wales Transport. They are super cool and they turn the diglyphs into single letters, among other things. Transport for Wales use the latter in all official signage now:

And then as of 2023, Museum of Wales created a font called Amgueddfa Headline Cymru for its new logo that's Welsh only and uses the diglyphs properly:

I was in the Waterfront Museum today, and they've put up some official Nadolig Llawen signs for Christmas. Those are in the same font, and the Ll in llawen has been diglyphed up into a single stacked letter for it too.

Hedgehog-shaped jar, Neolithic period (3500-3000 BCE)

things like... money, for aids, treatments, recreation, etc. supportive friends & family. connections in their community. a dedicated/compassionate care team. a fulfilling social life. effective treatments. living in an area that suits their needs (ex: rural vs urban, hot vs. cold climate, etc). all of these things & more.

even if you did somehow have 2 people with the same raw disability, if one person lives with their well-off, supportive family, and another lives in public housing with a neglectful health aide... the person living with their family is likely going to be able to do things that the person living in public housing isn't given the chance to do.