France Says AZERTY Keyboards Fail French Typists (arstechnica.com)

Ars Technica reports that the AZERTY keyboard layout used in France has a problem: it's not very good for writing French words, many of which require accents that can be accessed only awkwardly. An excerpt from the Ars story: In a statement released this week, the ministry lamented the fact that French keyboards, which use the AZERTY layout rather than the QWERTY layout familiar to English speakers, make it unnecessarily difficult to type common symbols and letters. While the 26 letters of the alphabet as well as common accented letters like é, à, è, and ù are generally represented similarly on an AZERTY keyboard, the ministry said that the @ symbol and the € symbol are inconveniently or inconsistently placed, as are commands to capitalize symbols like "ç". The trouble of finding how to properly capitalize accented letters is a big issue in written French, especially for legal texts and government documents where every letter of the names of people and businesses are capitalized. Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words.

Comments

Zimply yooz Qwerty

[Viol8]

I 'av ner problem typing zee french on zis keyberd layoot!

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[WarJolt]

Wrong. Clearly you have your keyboard misconfigured in dvorak mode.

Re:Zimply yooz Qwerty

[mjwx]

I 'av ner problem typing zee french on zis keyberd layoot!

Speak for yourself, I have always found the "snooty" key too far to reach, considering the amount I need that accent when typing French.

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[GabeGhearing]

The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)

That's a myth: http://www.straightdope.com/co...

Re: Zimply yooz Qwerty

[AthanasiusKircher]

The whole point of "erty" keyboards is to slow down the typists and reduce key-jams. It's an intentionally bad standard which has lived beyond its meaningfulness for more than 30 years now (when was the last manual typewriter made?)

That's a myth: http://www.straightdope.com/co...

Well, it's partly a myth. Yes, it is a myth that QWERTY was intended to slow down typists. It *WAS* intended to reduce key-jams on manual typewriters, and it did this by introducing frequent alternation between hands and by placing frequently used letters far apart. The frequent alternation between hands actually speeds up typing, so that's a positive for QWERTY, but the placement of frequently used letters far apart is no longer necessary -- and it was never optimized for modern computers and speed/ergonomics.

Basically, the Dvorak proponents often overstate their case, and your link is correct that some of the studies promoted by Dvorak himself had questionable methodology. The supposed benefits of 20-40% increase in speed and getting up to previous QWERTY speed with only 20-25 hours of training is bogus and was known to be bogus for the past 50 years or more.

On the other hand, various studies do show Dvorak has some advantage over QWERTY, both theoretically (in terms of motion needed to travel by the hands, etc.) and practically, but that advantage is likely more in the 5-10% speed increase range and it likely requires about 100 hours of retraining to get back to QWERTY speed for an existing touch-typist. That's just a lot of work for a small benefit, especially when one can use that 100 hours instead to train in specific ways and increase QWERTY speed instead -- which likely will result in a small speed increase as well.

So, GP is correct that QWERTY was designed to reduce manual jams that can no longer happen, and it IS a bad standard for modern computers, etc. But the improvements for moving to a better layout are quite small and would require extensive retraining... so we all tend to stick with a (slightly) inferior standard.

(How "inferior" is really difficult to know precisely, because to my knowledge the "gold standard" study has never been done. There are quite a few studies which have taken QWERTY typists and retrained them in Dvorak. And there are studies that waited until those retrained typists got up to their previous QWERTY speeds and then pitted them (now Dvorak typists) against existing QWERTY typists. But I've never seen reference to a study that took existing Dvorak typists who have been using that layout for years and retrained them in QWERTY -- probably because such people are incredibly rare, and likely next-to-impossible to find in the modern era of ubiquitous keyboards. 25 years ago we could have done a study like this, since many people wouldn't learn to type until high school or later, but now it may be next-to-impossible to even start training someone who has never spent significant time with a QWERTY keyboard first. And that previous QWERTY exposure will significantly affect "muscle memory" and cognitive load when confronted with a new standard, even after many hours of retraining.)

Just use whatever the Germans do

[CajunArson]

Look, just take a standard keyboard from Germany, walk down the Champs-Ãlysées with it, and I'm sure the French will surrender to it in a very organized fashion.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[Sable Drakon]

They still wouldn't be able to type in French on it though.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[93 Escort Wagon]

I think it might work better if you send the German keyboard by way of Belgium and Luxembourg.

Re: Just use whatever the Germans do

[BarbaraHudson]

Hmm, they come out as gibberish on Slashdot.

So do most of the articles, and many of the comments :-)

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[fnj]

Spoken like a true cheese-eating surrender monkey.

Jackass. Wild guess, but just in case you're USAian (I am), FYI there wouldn't be a USA if France (also Spain and the Netherlands) 240 years ago hadn't intervened in the struggle. Key material and funding and morale support was provided from the beginning. Lafayette arrived in 1777 and stood with Washington through the critical Valley Forge ordeal. In 1778 France entered into an outright alliance.

The USA suffered 6824 battle deaths during the Revolution; the French, 10,000.

France lost 1,150,000 sons in battle in WW1. Together with Russia (1,800,000) they bore the brunt of the fighting. The entire British Empire lost 734,000. The USA? 53,000 - about (but not quite) the same figure as Canada, and almost exactly the same number as Australia.

In one and one half months of fighting in the Battle of France in WW2, the French suffered 360,000 casualties. Compare to 1.1 million military casualties by the US (four times the population of France) in three and one half years of fighting.

Now, terrible blunders were committed during the Battle of France (by Britain as well as France). Together they matched the German forces numerically, with almost twice the artillery and almost 50% more tanks, and they were decisively beaten with tactics, strategy, fighting proficiency, and superior air power. Britain was able to withdraw to an unassailable island. France was not.

But the French Resistance strove bravely and effectively for four years, and the Free French forces withdrawn to Britain fought on.

Re:Just use whatever the Germans do

[schnell]

The French unquestionably played a decisive role in the American Revolution. It is a very debatable question whether the US would exist today had the French not intervened on the side of the Colonies in the revolution, and it is probably more likely that it would not. So the US owes the Ancien Regime of 250 years ago a great deal. But let's not overstate things.

Jackass. Wild guess, but just in case you're USAian (I am), FYI there wouldn't be a USA if France (also Spain and the Netherlands) 240 years ago hadn't intervened in the struggle.

As mentioned, the French played a potentially decisive role. But they didn't do it because they loved America, they did it because they hated the British and saw them as engaged in their own proto-"Vietnam" and saw it in their own best interests to jump in. Remember that the French, 20 years earlier, had "owned" Canada and still had rights to most of trans-Mississippi North America. So it wasn't exactly altruistic. Spain (which was just in it to recapture Gibraltar) and the Netherlands played almost no functional role, other than a potential Spanish-French invasion of Britain keeping their fleet at home in 1779.

Key material and funding and morale support was provided from the beginning. Lafayette arrived in 1777 and stood with Washington through the critical Valley Forge ordeal. In 1778 France entered into an outright alliance.

100% agreed. It is in fact very likely that France's support of the Colonies in the American Revolution indirectly led to the ouster of the French monarchy in their own forthcoming revolution because of the debt they racked up in supporting the nascent US. So, again, mad props to France.

The USA suffered 6824 battle deaths during the Revolution; the French, 10,000.

Misleading at best, if not outright wrong. If France did indeed incur those deaths, it was in naval combat in the West Indies trying to win or protect territories there, unrelated to the US.

France lost 1,150,000 sons in battle in WW1. Together with Russia (1,800,000) they bore the brunt of the fighting. The entire British Empire lost 734,000. The USA? 53,000 - about (but not quite) the same figure as Canada, and almost exactly the same number as Australia.

No arguments there either, but WWI was a European war. The vast majority of Americans at the time wanted nothing to do with it, and only became involved after the Kaiser's policy of unrestricted submarine warfare (and the revelation of the Zimmermann telegram) more or less forced the US in. The US only participated actively in the last six months of WWI, so of course their deaths were lower. But it is still very arguable that the US economic and materiel support in the war was one of the few key deciding factors in support of the Triple Entente.

In one and one half months of fighting in the Battle of France in WW2, the French suffered 360,000 casualties. Compare to 1.1 million military casualties by the US (four times the population of France) in three and one half years of fighting.

No arguments there either. But it would be absolutely insane to argue that the US's participation in WW2, along with that of the Soviets, was not the deciding factor. France (at least the part that wasn't under the collaborationist Vichy government) suffered mightily during the war. But to suggest that France's contribution was greater than that of the US is just silly.

Long story short, the French are not "cheese eating surrender monkeys." They have a proud tradition of victorious warfare dating at least back to Charlemagne. And they were the unquestioned masters of Europe during the Napoleonic era. But all that is no reason to try to diminish the US record in order to try to prove that the French are bad-asses.

QWERTZ auch

[astro]

The same problem with inconsistently placed and difficult to reach symbols exists with the German QWERTZ keyboards also. I switched to one when I moved here from USA because the everyday need for ö, ä, ü and ß outweighed the difficulties, but it has taken me ages to get used to coding on it.

Re:QWERTZ auch

[markus]

I technically know how to type both on German and US keyboards. In practice, I find German layouts to be incredibly tedious -- even when typing German.

I much rather prefer a US keyboard layout and a working "Compose" key. Typing accented character is very straight forward and logical when composing the character from its underlying parts. Yes, it requires multiple keystrokes to type a single character; but I have gotten pretty fast at typing those.

Alternatively, some of my friends/relatives have switched to a US layout and refuse to enter native accented characters altogether. German officially sanctions the use of substitutes "ä" becomes "ae", "Ö" becomes "Oe" and "ß" becomes "ss". Maybe, the French should come up with a similar system.

It's ok..

[cfalcon]

...QWERTY has been failing English typists for over a century!

Re:It's ok..

[Sable Drakon]

But at least QWERTY is 95% consistent in what keys perform what functions and where they are in the layout. French AZERTY isn't anywhere near that. France just needs to pick up the Canadian French layout, problem solved.

Re:It's ok..

[markus]

I think that is mostly a myth. It intuitively seems plausible that a more optimized keyboard layout would allow typists to be more efficient than when typing on QWERTY.

And there certainly have been several studies that place layouts such as Dvorak ahead of QWERTY. But a closer look at these studies shows that they are all heavily biased and flawed. More scientifically thorough studies surprisingly give Dvorak only a tiny lead over QWERTY if even that. With adequate practice, a good typist is pretty damn fast no matter the layout; OTOH, even the nicest layout can't make up for lack of practice.

You are correct though that there are horrible keyboard layouts that end up slowing you down, no matter how much you practice. I don't have any first-hand experience with AZERTY. But maybe, it's one of those really bad layouts; I wouldn't want to rule that out. And there obviously is an advantage to have a standardized keyboard. QWERTY is one of those standards that are readily available in most parts of the world. There is something to be said about that being useful. And it's the main reason I personally never bothered learning Dvorak.

Finally, if you really want to get substantially faster than QWERTY, you have to look at cording keyboards in combination with lots of macros. That's how real-time transcription of speech works. But the learning curve is said to be incredibly difficult. So, definitely not something you'd want to do unless you really need it.

Re:It's ok..

[BarbaraHudson]

And that's the French's fault. I went to buy a new keyboard and came across some keyboards with big bright yellow keycaps and black lettering - would have been perfect for reduced vision until I saw that they were AZERTY. No wonder they were being dumped ultro-cheap by some importer who hoped nobody noticed until they got home, because NOBODY in Quebec or the rest of Canada uses AZERTY.

Re:It's ok..

[alexhs]

I think that the English spelling has failed the English language from even before keyboards were invented, with the substitution of letters like thorn (not printed by Slashdot, though it is part of ISO-8859-1) with th that already had other pronunciations associated to it.

Look at orthographic depth. French is just as hard as English when you want to spell a word for which you have the pronunciation, however, when reading a word in French, apart from a few exceptions, you can reconstruct the pronunciation from the rules, where English is quite irregular (so, one-to-many vs many-to-many mappings).

Ironically, the Ars Technica article spells cafe instead of café.

In lower case, only ae (æ) and oe ligatures are missing from the French keyboard. Moreover, they're a PITA to type on Windows (alt code only) while there are sequences on OS X and Linux. Due to Bull SAS French engineers' stupidity (link in French), (oe) ligature is not in ISO-8859-1, which means Slashdot won't print it. Danes ensured that æ was in ISO-8859-1 (but it is much less used than oe in French). These ligatures are not typographical stylistic conventions, (oe) ligature is pronounced as é (like in, erm, café) when followed by a consonant where oe is pronounced o-e. For example, with words that are spelled and pronounced mostly the same in French and English: coexist, coelacanth. English lost the ligature, while it is present in French on the second word, which helps with the pronunciation.

In upper case, there are dead keys for ^, " and `, so Ô, Ï and È are not problematic. However, É and Ç again are a PITA on Windows. On Unix and OS X, one can use caps lock and the lower case letter. Upper case ÿ is also missing from ISO-8859-1, as it technically does not exist (no word begins with it , because " indicates that the letter is not pronounced together with the preceding letter), but ÿ is only used by old proper nouns, which sometimes have to be printed in all upper case.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

Not sure what you are talking about. The point here is that French people can't properly type their own language on their keyboards. It's not about legislating the language, it's about being able to type it correctly. Not using a word because you can't type it easily is annoying. As is realizing that because you didn't type the accented version of a letter, your sentence changes meaning. In short, it's about giving people control so that they can actually write whatever they want.

Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[AchilleTalon]

Just buy the Canadian-French multilingual keyboard and map you keys accordingly and stop whining. The AZERTY keyboard is a real piece of shit, I don't know why it took so long to realize that to French people.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[Anonymous Coward]

The keyboard is fine, it's the language that is shit. No one can hear the difference between these 60+ symbols, so why isn't 26 enough for writing?
French is also discriminating to dyslectic people by inverting a spoken language that is totally different from the written language. I'm glad it's slowly being dropped as an official European language. English and German is plenty.

Re:Canadian-French multilingual keyboard

[danbob999]

The Canadian so-called multilingual keyboard it shit and no one uses it except Apple. It has many flaws. The Canada French keyboard is much better. It can type all French characters while still being a QWERTY keyboard. France should use it too.

Status: WONTFIX

[Anonymous Coward]

"Often, an accent is the only distinguishing factor between two similarly spelled words."

Sounds like a problem with the language, not the keyboard. WONTFIX

Re:Status: WONTFIX

[markus]

You could ignorantly say the same thing about several Asian languages. The fact of the matter is that there are more things than just vowels and consonants in human speech. Tone is very much an important part of language. Western languages usually don't put a lot of weight on tone to carry information, but French is notable exception. And even English sounds "funny" if implicit tone isn't pronounced properly.

Languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese are entirely unintelligible if tones aren't pronounced properly. In these languages, tones carry just as much information as vowels and consonants.

Japanese is apparently a language with a hidden tonal dependency. If you don't pronounce the tones properly, a native speaker won't be able to understand a word of what you are saying. But tones don't actually carry additional information. The correct tone can be derived from the rest of the sounds in the word. That's why Japanese words can be written in hiragana without needing any accent marks. To add extra complexity, tones do vary somewhat from region to region.

Re:Why is this just coming up now?

[93 Escort Wagon]

The choice probably had more to do with not having an English key layout rather than it actually being useful to French typists.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

Have you maybe thought that other languages use accents and extra letters because they need them to describe phonemes that are not used in English?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[Grishnakh]

They *did* switch to a different layout: the AZERTY one. Why'd they do that if it doesn't work for them? And why are they only now complaining about it? It's not like typewriters are a new thing in France.

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[BarbaraHudson]

"The oe and ae ligatures need to be tied up and have the crap beaten out of them."

• ---- Aesop's fables.

A relic from the past

[peppepz]

The set of characters present on many European keyboards was defined by the ancient localized ASCII encodings, ISO 646. Yes, there were non-US versions of ASCII, that contained funny characters in the lower 7 bit range. This allowed for a very limited amount of regional characters (around 10), and as a result many useful characters were omitted, such as uppercase variants and precise diacritics. This is not only a problem for the French, and it isn't due to the AZERTY/QWERTY difference.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[ColdWetDog]

You looser ....

Re:Makes me appreciate the English alphabet

[meerling]

You realize of course that the English language has 40 phonems, but only 26 letters, and of those letters, you can make up for some of the missing sounds by using 2 letter combinations (for example 'th' and 'sh' ), but then there are the letters that have multiple sounds, as well as multiple letters having the same sound. The alphabet used for English is a F-ing mess! You'd think it was designed by bored monks in the middle ages that were either stoned, drunk, or both.

Accidents of history

[jgotts]

The reason why typewriters and computer keyboards are so US centric is that the English-speaking world happened to be at the top of its game when these products were created. First it was Great Britain and its territories and then the United States. The language of computer science is English. Computer scientists use less Latin than any other scientist that I'm aware of. All common programming languages are based upon the language of mathematics, which is Latin with symbols. English is close enough: All common programming languages read left-to-right, top to bottom. All common programming languages are alphabetic and use mainly SVO, subject-verb-object, just like English. The keywords in all common programming languages are English words. The punctuation marks are the same or more similar to English than any other language. You could say that all common programming languages are Latin with symbols, written in English.

This is why it is easier to be a programmer for a native English speaker than for any other person. Everything fits like a glove, because we invented a large portion of this technology, not because we're any better than any other person. (*)

As China rises, we're beginning to see things like electronics data sheets written in Chinese with an English translation as an afterthought. Quite clearly the standard computer keyboard is only natural for English users. It's utterly horrible for the Chinese. Imagine if the keyboard was created in the Far East. Our 26 letter alphabet with no accent marks would be the afterthought. Programming languages might have been mostly symbol-oriented with Chinese symbolic keywords. We might have needed to be fairly good Chinese speakers to be any good at programming. Future technologies could be like this.

Any contact with an alien race would be more of the same. We could have roughly the same technology but vastly different ways of interacting with it, depending upon whatever culture was dominant when it was created.

(*) I'm aware that QWERTY was designed to slow down typists but it's actually extremely well suited to type English. All 26 letters and the common punctuation marks require a single keypress, and they're all right at our fingertips.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[TapeCutter]

Complaining about the inconsistency of the location of certain keys across keyboards started when typewriters were invented and hasn't stopped, I have the same complaint about my English desktop vs my English laptop. I have to press two keys on my laptop for "home", my desktop has a single home key. Like most developers a lot of my work is copy-paste-edit, inconsistency in the placement and shift status of the home/pgup/pgdn keys is a pain in the arse.

I don't really care about French keyboards. I do have to work on Japanese servers at times, but I do not read/write/speak Japanese. To do that I need another English PC beside me so I can compare the locations of menu items in the GUI. Oddly enough a Japanese dos box usually works in English, the Japanese logs are often in English too. The software I help develop ( for a Japanese multi-national) is the same, everything under the hood is in English, our Japanese masters just provide Japanese translations of English resource strings for the front end. To make things just that bit more confusing, the bulk of the coding is done by Russian sub-contractors working in Moscow. The Russians we deal with are all bilingual and very fluent in written English, with a few exception the Japanese and Aussies are all mono-lingual.

Re: The more you tighten your grip...

[bestweasel]

They noticed that people were leaving accents off initial capitals because they're hard to type, leading others to assume that accents weren't needed on initial capitals, thus changing the language. Presumably the increasing use of keyboards has worsened the problem.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[bedonnant]

If you consider the close example "I READ it", you don't know if it's present or past tense. That's a loss of information. Anyway, the point is moot, no one in France is seriously pushing for changing the language. People even want to keep their local idioms, although they're slowly dying out.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[ClickOnThis]

There are plenty of inconsistent pronunciations in English. I wouldn't rag on people who pronounce schedule with a "sh" sound.

Consider the following famous poem, possibly anonymous, but also possibly excerpted from The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité.

English is tough stuff

Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,
Dies and diet, lord and word,
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)
Now I surely will not plague you
With such words as plaque and ague.
But be careful how you speak:
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;
Cloven, oven, how and low,
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.

Hear me say, devoid of trickery,
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore,
Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,
Exiles, similes, and reviles;
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far;
One, anemone, Balmoral,
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;
Gertrude, German, wind and mind,
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.
Blood and flood are not like food,
Nor is mould like should and would.
Viscous, viscount, load and broad,
Toward, to forward, to reward.
And your pronunciation's OK
When you correctly say croquet,
Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,
Friend and fiend, alive and live.

Ivy, privy, famous; clamour
And enamour rhyme with hammer.
River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,
Doll and roll and some and home.
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,
Neither does devour with clangour.
Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,
And then singer, ginger, linger,
Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.

Query does not rhyme with very,
Nor does fury sound like bury.
Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth.
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.
Though the differences seem little,
We say actual but victual.
Refer does not rhyme with deafer.
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;
Dull, bull, and George ate late.
Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,
Science, conscience, scientific.

[...]

The above is an excerpt. (Slashdot won't let me post the whole thing because the lines are too short.) Go here to see the entire poem.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[ClickOnThis]

Revising the language because accented characters are a PITA even for the french is a damned fine idea.

[...]

Drop the accents already - they're a hangover from the past.

Sorry Barbara. I have read many of your posts and respect your opinion. But I have to disagree with you on this one.

Removing accents from a language robs it of expressive power. Many words used in English have been borrowed from other languages, and robbed of their accents, have lost much of their flavour in the transition.

Consider naive, compared to naïve. Look at what is lost, from the omission of a simple umlaut.

Or expose, compared to exposé. Or lame, compared to lamé.

It's time we considered the lack of an accent as a spelling mistake, not an act of expediency.

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[mysidia]

I think the GP needs to just cut to the chase, for goodness sake, drop this façade, have a saké, relax to some animé , and then complete their exposé, with the suggestion the des gens qui parlent français people start typing all their written communiqés in English which conveniently disposes of the accented letters problem.

Since of course, no words used in the US have diacritic marks on them, ever

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[PCM2]

My PCs all have US English keyboards.

To type accented letters, in Windows I hit Start+Spacebar to toggle back and forth from the English International keyboard layout. (It ships with Windows, but you do need to install it and possibly activate the hotkey.)

The English International layout allows you to type most European accents with easy to remember mnemonics, like typing double quotes plus a vowel to put an umlaut over the vowel, or typing a single quote plus a C to put a cedilla under the C.

I know OS X has keyboard shortcuts for most of the accented characters, too, and surely there must be an easy way to achieve similar results on Linux, so I'm not sure what the problem really is.

Maybe what's needed isn't a new keyboard, but simply more education?

Re:The more you tighten your grip...

[shutdown -p now]

It depends on which kind of present tense (i.e. which meaning you're trying to convey). English has more than one.

Re:X11 compose key

[Z00L00K]

Well, most European keyboards have the "dead" keys containing the accents like and `, so you push and then e to get é.

I'm not sure why they actually complain about the € character - it's not often used except when you write about money and it's only a few persons compared to the vast number of users that suffers there. For some reason I have the character instead of the $ on shift+4 - a character that I never use and I don't know who's using it.

Those that have set the keyboard standards seems to have ignored completely which characters that are most used by computer users.

Also realize that the QWERTY and AZERTY layouts are intentionally made to slow down typing - this because the early typewriters otherwise got a hammer jam.