Supplanting Keyboards

I am presently working with a small company to use a common hand held device as a Keyboard typing replacement.

Obviously I can't say too much about it but a bit of background would not hurt.

First, as most people know the "QWERTY" design was created to slow typists down by putting the most used keys in the most awkward places. This was because the original typewriters often suffered key-jams with overly fast typists.

A more sensible keyboard arrange which never caught on was the "Dvorak layout".

Touch typers find it too hard to train out of QWERTY, and most of the rest of us Hunt-&-Peck, so any keyboard arrangement is as good as any other - hence "DvoraK" never achieved widespread use.

The problem is that Hunt-&-Peck is inherently slow but leads to familiar problems in writing on a computer. Missing words, especially joining words, plural and singular mix-ups, general jumps in the text and other oddities.

This is from looking at the keyboard and refocussing on the screen, the little words are forgotten in the process.

Two electronic approaches have been used to overcome these and other problems.

1) Using gestures, usually through a "pen", but more suited to a gear-stick (with tactile feedback).
2) Harmonics, using combinations of a few keys to produce a large number of letters.

The inherent problem with both these approaches is that require either touch screens or some other special device, plus people have to be persuaded train themselves.

Our approach leans heavily to harmonics, though arguably gesture is also being used.

The trick is finding an everyday electronic device that people already use and adopting to act as a typer.

@GregS

For me a touch screen with configurable keyboard would
be the best choice towards the future i think.

Lets say i want to type alot of flemish words, and you want
to type alot of english words. If we would put the most used
letters on the top or in the middle of the keyboard then that
would speed up our typing. Yes ofcource we would need to
learn these new keyboards and adapt to the changes.

But as i have just now used my cellphone to type a message,
and i do that not alot, i managed to do it, al be it not very fast.
And that is with abc, def, ghi, ... etc.

Or we could present the users with some choices of standard
software-keyboards they want to use or experiment with.

And if you would try that the hardware-way, you could let the
users choose his keyboard he wants with a replaceble keyboard-pad
that he klicks in his portable device.

Just some fast toughts, Dirk.

@GregS

I haven't even tried to do more than enter phone numbers, names, etc. into my phone with the phone pad. You're right. It's really a pain.

Just recently I started using a Palm Z22 wtih Graffiti 2 software. I'm not terribly fast at entering text with Graffiti, but it's coming along. It's fairly intuitive, and I think could provide for some fairly quick text entry once one is used to it.

This Palm unit also allows use of a touch screen with the stylus for "typing," but so far I like Graffiti better.

Paul

@Dirk-B

Quote:

There is an inherent problem with keying, as against controlling by keys. The touch screen is great for controls, but for typing there is no tactile response, and moving fingers about in order to type, takes a lot of time to become proficient and is inherently slow.

What we plan is a freely configurable system. In Flemish the most used letters will be different to English, but as a bilingual writer you may prefer doing key placement in your mother tongue.

Some positions (ours is harmonic based) are primary, best suited for the most used letters and punctuation, secondary, third and fourth placed options, are also helped by keyset shifts, where special, mathematical and other typefaces can be moved in and out.

The critical point is visual coordination between letter choices and what is actually being typed, ideally this should be presented in the textline so that you are looking at what you are typing.

Quote:

If I remember rightly Graffiti is a gesture based system, and it can be used as a proxy shorthand, but it takes time to learn and can be frustrating teaching it as well as the user - this is inherent in most gesture systems (Quicktype being an exception).

The trick is to take the eyes away from what the hand is doing, allowing the letters to be typed like a musical instrument is played - some tests on similar systems have relative novices typing faster than stenographers.