Changing the keys
How the French government is changing the keyboard standard
Name the last time you touched a keyboard.
If you’re a normal everyday American citizen — it was probably yesterday or today.
Keyboards are a vital everyday technology that seems nearly irreplaceable at the moment.
Around the world, there are different standards for keys of course — but despite voiced drawbacks — nothing has really been done to change the position of characters.
Researchers at Aalto University, as part of an international collaboration, have now used computation methods to place keyboard characters for easier, more comfortable typing.
The result of that — a new keyboard standard.
The New Standard
The new keyboard was introduced by France on 2 April 2019 — a result of an advanced algorithm.
“Algorithms, like the ones we have developed for the French keyboard, can help us make better decisions. They can quickly evaluate the problems and benefits of different designs and achieve fair compromises,” said Dr. Anna Maria Feit, lead researcher of the project. “But they also need the guidance from humans who know about the problem.”
With concerns voiced by the French government in 2015 on the existing keyboard in the air — priority was shifted to creating a new standard that allowed for easier typing in the French language.
The algorithm — created by the Aalto University-led team automatically arranged the characters for optimum benefit.
The new keyboard — The AZERTY Standard — includes commonly used characters in the French language, such as œ, “ ,” or É, as well as 60 other new characters, which are arranged in groups predicted by that algorithm.
As for characters like “@” and “/” have been moved to more accessible locations, as have ligatures and accents.
“When rearranging the symbols on the keyboard, there are conflicting things to consider,” said Feit. “ “Characters that get used the most should be moved to a position that is easy to reach. But if you move it a long way from where it was originally, people will take a long time to learn it and be less likely to use your new layout.”
To inform the design, researchers built statistical models of character use in the modern French language.
Drawings on newspaper articles, French Wikipedia, legal texts, as well as emails, social media, and programming code were all considered.
Despite previous work that assumes people use their fingers in certain ways, they gathered the key presses of over 900 people in a large-scale crowdsourcing study to see what counted as an ‘easy’ key press.
“The trick to making the collaboration effective was using our data to build a tool that the French experts in the standardization committee could put different conditions into, and see what the optimal keyboard that resulted from the data looked like,” said Aalto University Professor Antti Oulasvirta.
The algorithm that Dr. Feit and team produced for the French committee can easily be adapted to other languages too.
It simply requires data for modeling.
Most countries use the standard QWERTY keyboard — what I’m typing on now — which was originally designed for English languages.
Dr. Feit hopes that the model produced for France could be used for countries and languages in the future.
“Our goal is that in the future people and algorithms design user interfaces together,” she said.
