Yasser Maslout-Siegfried
Web developer in Bremen. User experience and accessibility. Born in Cairo.
أهلاً، أنا ياسر.
01
Who I am
I studied media engineering in Cairo and started out there, building websites for clients like Vodafone UK. I moved to Bremen for a master's in digital media at the University of Bremen, and I stayed. That was more than 15 years ago.
Since then I have built websites for agencies, for the university and for the city of Bremen. Along the way, accessibility became the part of the job I care about most. A public website is only public if everyone can use it: with a keyboard, with a screen reader, with large text.
I speak Arabic, German and English. Away from the screen: long runs, long rides and diving in Dahab.
02
What I do now
- Job
- Web developer at WFB Wirtschaftsförderung Bremen, since 2020. I'm part of the web team behind bremen.de, barrierefrei.bremen.de and other city platforms. My focus: user experience, accessibility audits to WCAG and BITV, and usability tests with real users.
- Side project
- Lahga, an open dictionary of Arabic dialects. Right now: more words, and checks by native speakers for entries a language model drafted. Details below.
- Learned
- Project Manager (IHK) certificate, Handelskammer Bremen, June 2026.
- Updated
- October 2026
03
Lahga لهجة
Lahga is Arabic for “dialect”. Lahga is an open, collaborative dictionary of Arabic dialects: more than 2,000 Modern Standard Arabic headwords and 25,000 dialect equivalents across 24 dialects. I designed it, built it and run it.
The idea is simple. Every dialect word is linked to a Standard Arabic headword, so you can see how Cairo, Beirut, Baghdad and Casablanca say the same thing, side by side.
What you can do there
- Search by Standard Arabic or by any dialect.
- Open a word page: the headword, its meaning, and its regional variants, each tagged by dialect.
- Browse by dialect, all 24 of them, from Morocco to Oman.
- See the words where the dialects differ the most.
- Draw a random word.
- Play word puzzles.
- Add a word or correct an entry. An account takes a minute.
Open by design
- Content
- CC BY-SA 4.0. Copy it, build on it, credit Lahga, share alike.
- Code
- AGPL-3.0, on GitHub.
- Data
- Available as open data.
- Stack
- Nuxt, Vue, TypeScript, PostgreSQL. Right-to-left Arabic interface.
04
Speak Egyptian?
I grew up in Cairo, and I like games I can finish over a coffee. So here is a tiny memory game with words from Cairo, the dialect I grew up with. Flip two cards to match an Egyptian Arabic word with its meaning. Works with a keyboard and a screen reader, and takes about a minute. For 24 more dialects, try Lahga.
05
Bremen City Quest
I live in Bremen, and this is a game about the city. A location-based text adventure, made with D. Davydenkova, S. Kozuhovskij and P. Szmidt during our studies at the University of Bremen. You start in the city centre, follow a compass to each point, and at every point a ghost asks you a question about the city.
The original game ran on Windows Phones. This is a new adaptation with a slightly different text, built for the web so it runs on any device. It uses your phone's GPS, so you have to be in Bremen to play it.
Contact