The Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia's constitution was ratified in 1995. Most Ethiopians have never read it.
Not because they don't care — but because it has never been accessible. The official text exists in Amharic and English, but finding a readable version online, on a phone, in either language, is genuinely difficult.
I built ethio-constitution.vercel.app to change that.
The technical choices
The site is a SvelteKit 2 static site — no server, no database, no JavaScript required to read. Just HTML and CSS delivered from Vercel's edge network.
The entire constitution lives in structured data files. Updating any article is a one-line change. Each article has its Amharic and English text stored as parallel data, rendered side by side.
The font choice mattered: Noto Sans Ethiopic is the only web font that handles the Fidel script reliably across devices. I load it from Google Fonts with display: swap so the content appears immediately even before the font loads.
What I learned
Building for Amharic first taught me things about internationalization I hadn't encountered building for English. The Fidel script is an abugida — each character represents a consonant-vowel pair — and the line-height and font-size defaults that work for Latin text look wrong for Ethiopic. I spent more time on typography than on any feature.
The biggest lesson was simpler: the act of publishing matters. Before I built this site, the FDRE constitution was technically public but practically inaccessible. Now it isn't. That's the whole project. Good software doesn't need to be complex.
What's next
I want to add article-level bookmarking and a search function. If you have ideas or want to contribute, the source is on GitHub.