Inventions
Alex Bäcker
1 min readThis article discusses the limitations of the QWERTY and DVORAK keyboard layouts in the context of modern autocorrect, arguing that key placement should prioritize minimizing error-prone sequences by separating characters frequently typed near each other.
God knows why QWERTY placed the i next to two other vowels. It makes autocorrect's job so much harder. Interestingly, the DVORAK keyboard, designed to minimize travel time and maximize alternation between hands in typing, makes the problem even worse, placing all vowels next to each other. In the age of Autocorrect, one of the overriding criteria for keyboard arrangements ought to be the one that disambiguates best between alternate possible words, placing letters next to each other that have the lowest frequency of occurring surrounded by the same letters, so that a press of a neighboring key from that intended is easily autocorrected to the intended one.