The real problems with keyboard switching

I was at the birds-of-a-feather entitled "Design Principles for A Regional, Multilingual Keyboard" last night.

(More on some of the issues there another day....)

In any case, there was an interesting side conversation that brought into specific relief the real complaints that I have heard from users about the problems that come up when one handles multilingual text entry by switching to other keyboard layouts. The complaints generally fall into three categories:

• When the script is the same (e.g. both the original and new layout use the Latin script as in English and French), subtle differences exist in the location of some of the letters that both of them share (such as the switching of the 'A' and the 'Z' keys between English and French).
• In many cases, all of the punctuation moves around in specific ways that seem to be pretty difficult to keep track of in a reasonable way.
• Although people do not tend to complain as much about the letter positions when the script changes  (e.g. from Latin to Hebrew), in general they would usually prefer the new layout to have some sort of phonetic relationship with the old one to lower the learning curve.

Suddenly, it hit me that there may be other (and better) ways to try to address much of the above three issues without breaking features like language tagging via the input language.

I am going to keep thinking about this one and maybe I will have more to report on this in the future.

(In the meantime, I will remember that one of the cool things about MSKLC is that you can actually address all three of the above issues in many cases!)

I think it will be good to see what some of the results are with customers who use some of the multilingual keyboards like the ones described in the Swedish and Finnish standards. With so many smart people paying attention to the problem, I believe that only good things can come up in the future....

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