Volla for non-German speaking users

[netvor]

I'm sorry to rant, but I really like Volla, I have the original Volla Phone for couple years and despite minor flaws I really enjoyed it. I think you are doing great work!

And that's also why I feel it's such a shame that the accessibility of Volla site and forum is pretty low. It's a shame that such a great work cannot be enjoyed easily by more people, at least in the EU. (I'm from Czech Republic but that's not too relevant.)

To be more concrete: there are clearly efforts to make Volla.online accessible with English, but unfortunately there are some serious gaps. You can do better. I myself consider myself fan of Volla and your work so I'm more willing to "jump through some hoops", and even I get annoyed by some things, from most important to least:

* Order Now links point to shop which is 100% German.
* Looking at Volla 22 vs Volla x23 -- the comparison table (PNG or JPG) is not localized at all.
* Forum is german UNTIL I log in. Fine, I guessed what the "Login" button would be in German (the Power Off icon next to it does not help) and I don't know what the checkboxes around username & password mean (I guess one of them has to be "remember me"
* Telegram group is also German (I guess it's meant to be multi-language but it does not feel welcoming if I connect and all I see is German or German-first, including (perhaps) forum rules & announcement. I wonder if separate English group would help.
* Cookies dialogs often appear in German

Again, I'm a big fan of Volla team, the mission, hardware, OS. You are doing important work. I also know how important it is to stay focused, I'm 100% OK if 99% of "real discussions" are happening in German. I'm not asking for "opening" the community per se. If majority of your users / engineers are more comfortable with using their first language, then please keep it so.

What I am trying to show is that some of us, outside Germany, are rooting for you, and we would even like to share links and even recommend Volla to our friends, but these random gaps in localization are not helping.

"Vielen Dank für Ihr Verständnis, einen schönen Tag!" (I apologize if that greeting is bad, I used auto-translate for it. I myself only know how "noch eim Mass, bite" in German. )

[waldbursche]

I have forwarded your enquiry. Volla should get back here to you shortly with an answer.

[Volla]

Dear user,

Thank you for choosing a first-generation Volla Phone. You have probably discovered that we have introduced TalkBack, an open-source solution for the accessibility of Volla OS, which a blind user had suggested.
You are welcome to ask your questions in English in our Telegram group. Your native language is also welcome. However, it is true that most users in our Telegram group speak German.

For our website, we use the RapidWeaver editorial system and for our shop, the RapidCard Pro extension. Since RapidCard Pro does not support multilingualism, we have built the shop bilingually. In addition to the German texts, English translations can be found in a gray color. This is probably not obvious or at least tedious if you work with a speech synthesis that reads the text of a website aloud.

We are working on new content for our website. In the long term, we will implement a new shop system. The conversion or introduction of new technology takes time in a small company. We have already decided on an ERP system that can be combined with a shop system at a later date. For foreign users, we currently offer all products on Indiegogo. There is an English-language checkout function here.

https://quintus.volla.online
https://tablet.volla.online

In the Czech Republic, we sell our products on https://kaufland.cz, and soon also through another retail partner. Maybe we can announce another surprise for our users in this country soon.

We are planning to update the forum software. I hope that this will also solve your problems with participating in the forum.

Enjoy a happy summer day! Your further questions are welcome.

Marc Aurel

[netvor]

Thank you for your reply. I understand that maintaining true multi-lingual shop & page is not easy, especially for companies which grow fast after initial period where focus needs to be on a non-english group. Indeed I haven't noticed the grey texts, what I was referring to was product names and variant names, buttons, etc. That said, I have already understood that Volla Phone 22 is sold out in black color so that's that.

I haven't been checking out Quintus. I checked out the indiegogo/kicstarter page and, I'll be honest, while i'm excited that Volla is working on a new hardware, the software choices seem to show that Volla is actually going in a different direction than I personally anticipated. I mean, custom cloud, backup solution and messaging app? AI? Those are things I normally want to *avoid* by looking for mainstream alternatives.

It might just be just really confusing messaging (it does open a lot of questions) but what seems to be as one of main selling point is "integrated / embedded cloud" -- which is not what I want, all I want is CardDav/CalDAV which I can configure with instance of my choice (using Syncthing for the rest), and not "synchronize to other phones", and below that a working (and reasonably up-to-date) OS.

That said, competition is good, so I'll be still rooting, but the direction that Quintus seems to show is just something different than I expected. The sales pitch is using all the "scary" words, which tells me that it's not for me.

Cheers,
aL.