They also put together a large crowdsourcing study in which they asked 900 people to type letter combinations to show them how people physically type.
Performance was key, so they wanted similar symbols grouped together, and finally, the keyboard needed to be ergonomic and easy to use.įeit and her team already had years of research on using algorithms for optimization, and it was relatively simple to collect datasets of billions of characters taken from not only French newspapers and legal texts, but also social media posts and Wikipedia entries. That’s also why the researchers built a “cost function” to quantify how far away new placement of characters would be compared with the standard keyboard. The French government had given them four key parameters: The letter characters had to be kept as they were on the current AZERTY keyboard, to avoid too big a change for users. Photo courtesy of Anna Maria FeitĮasy enough, Feit and her team thought. “They wanted to counteract that trend.”Īnna Maria Feit poses in Paris with the new AZERTY keyboard. “Especially younger people don’t type French in the proper way, to the point where many of them think the accents are no longer needed,” Feit says. It’s easier to write an E or an A rather than a multi-key command to create É or Á.
The problem, France explained to Feit and her team when they began in 2016, is inherent in the way young French people type. The challenge sparked work from an international collaboration led by Feit’s team and included linguists, economists, keyboard manufacturers and more stakeholders. “We saw it as a big chance to bring our research to life and make use of it in a public project,” says Anna Maria Feit, the lead researcher. A team at Finland’s Aalto University read about it in the news and, after consulting with a postdoc on their team from France, they seized the opportunity to apply their work in computational methods to the design. The project began in 2015, when the French government decided it wanted a new keyboard standard. Symbols such as and #, which have come into greater use in the age of Twitter and Facebook, have been moved to more accessible locations. It includes common French characters like œ and É, as well as 60 other new characters not included on the existing keyboard. The new AZERTY standard developed for France’s Ministry of Culture by AFNOR, the benchmark French body for voluntary standards, used a predictive algorithm to design a keyboard that is more intuitive and ergonomic for French speakers than the current AZERTY keyboard. Now researchers have harnessed the power of the algorithm to create a new keyboard standard for French typists-and they say it’s easily adaptable to design new keyboards for all kinds of European languages. But the keys traditionally used were designed for English special characters in other languages, like letters with accent marks, are difficult to access or missing altogether. Billions of people use keyboards daily, all across the globe.
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