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

[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: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.