Merveilleux! New AZERTY Keyboard Makes It Easier to Type in French
Keyboards with algorithm-powered AZERTY standard rolling out this summer
Billions of people use keyboards daily, all across the globe. 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.
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.
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. It includes common French characters like œ and É, as well as 60 other new characters not included on the existing keyboard. Symbols such as @ and #, which have come into greater use in the age of Twitter and Facebook, have been moved to more accessible locations.
The project began in 2015, when the French government decided it wanted a new keyboard standard. 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.
“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. “It was a perfect job for an algorithm.”
The challenge sparked work from an international collaboration led by Feit’s team and included linguists, economists, keyboard manufacturers and more stakeholders....MORE
The problem, France explained to Feit and her team when they began in 2016, is inherent in the way young French people type. It’s easier to write an E or an A rather than a multi-key command to create É or Á.
“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. “They wanted to counteract that trend.”...
