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

[Martin Benjamin <martin.benjamin@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As an alternative approach, what about doing some tests with actual 
users?  People could be given sample texts to type on a few different 
keyboard layouts for a given language.  The researchers could (a) 
observe the people typing, and (b) ask them for their opinions.
On a personal note, I have been exposed to a number of different 
European keyboards recently.  The main difficulties I have experienced:
* finding specific characters on the keyboard, such as '
* keys that are too busy (do too many different things depending on alt 
and shift combos)
On the other hand, letter placement is not too problematic; although the 
z and y keys on the keyboard most commonly used in my locale are 
reversed from qwerty, I've found that my brain is able to make the flip 
without too much grief.  Based on that (limited) experience, I would 
suggest that it is easy for people to learn letter placement, but more 
difficult for them to memorize complicated escape sequences.  How to 
confirm this hunch?  A little human observation could answer a lot of 
questions that a complicated statistical analysis would never address.
Best,
Martin

Andrew Cunningham wrote:
> 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
>
>
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