[A12n-Collab] Re: [PALNet-general] Utilities for analyzing keyboards?

["Andrew Cunningham" <andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, June 29, 2008 3:52 pm, Tunde Adegbola wrote:
> 
> One feature that may also be useful is to determine the most
frequent
> pairs of characters so as to be able to arrange the
layout for difference
> fingers to type (each character of)
frequently occurring pairs of
> character
> Tunde
> 

Although such data would be most useful if you ditch
the notion of a qwerty keyboard and develop a layout from scratch based on
single character frequency and character pair frequencies.

A
common approach on non-Latin scripts.

The problem with African
languages would be weaning people away from the US or French keyboard
layouts that they are used to. 

For people who aren't overly
familiar with computers, such a change will have less impact, but would
require developing physical keyboards, with the characters printed on the
keys in order to facilitate typing.

Thinking about keyboard
layouts, ISO-9995 allows for two keys to access level 2 characters (the
two shift keys) and dictates their position). It also allows for one or
more keys to access level 3 (the AltGr key). I wonder why most keyboards
restrict them selves to a single key for accessing level 3 characters,
rather than having two such keys to facilitate typing? It would make
things easier.


Andrew
-- 
Andrew Cunningham
Research and Development Coordinator
Vicnet
State Library of
Victoria
Australia

andrewc@xxxxxxxxxxxxx