The fifteen problems · 13 of 15 · encoding
Script and encoding at the edges
SMS drops from 160 to 70 characters for Ethiopic. Webfonts would dominate page weight for exactly the readers who can least afford it. 47 World Bank captures carry bytes contradicting their declared charset. Hashes failed to reproduce until text was normalized to NFC and LF.
Five separate findings, each small, each the kind that costs a day when met unprepared.
SMS
Ethiopic falls outside GSM-7, so messages encode as UCS-2 and the per-message limit drops from 160 to 70 characters, roughly doubling cost for any design that assumed 160. SMS was ruled out for now, email only, with the finding kept for whenever it is reconsidered.
Fonts
Ethiopic webfonts are large and would dominate page weight for exactly the readers who can least afford it. The decision: ship no webfont, rely on the Android system stack, and confirm rendering, line height and wrapping on a real low-end handset with long reviewed labels, not glyph specimens. Device verification has not been done. This site follows the same rule; the Ethiopic you see here is your device's own font.
Declared charsets lie
47 World Bank captures (9.4 percent of that corpus by the programme's count) carry bytes contradicting their declared UTF-8 charset. They were recorded as explicit failures rather than decoded with replacement characters, because a replacement-character decode would have made every byte span suspect.
Canonicalization
Text is normalized to NFC and line endings to LF before hashing. That rule arrived after digests over git-held text failed to reproduce (14 of 19 claims failed; CRLF against LF every time) and .gitattributes had been amended five times, each time adding the path that had just broken.
Page chrome in two scripts
Ethiopian Reporter Amharic pages failed normalization with a malformed body container. The repair excluded one exact chrome subtree, applied one narrow presentational rule and forbade any whole-page fallback. That review also withdrew the already-accepted English text because the same chrome was in it.
user-beadwork/briefs/BRIEF_ethiopia-site-delivery-tiers_2026-08-02.md (SMS, fonts) · ethiopia-program/corpora/world-bank-ethiopia/ (charset failures) · 2026-07-24 (bilingual pilot, both withdrawn, both repaired) · build report §4.13 · retrieved 2026-08-21
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