dvorak vs. qwerty - the battle for typing speed (Aria Seter)

Aryeh Seter

Dvojek keyboard - completely different from the familiar QWERTY keyboard

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The English letters on the computer keyboard are arranged in a certain order. The top row begins with the letters Q, W, E, R, T, Y... and this arrangement is indeed called QWERTY, to distinguish it from other arrangements of the letters that were, or still are.
Has anyone asked themselves why the letters on the keyboard are arranged precisely in this order and not, for example, according to the ABC order?

Speed ​​limit design

The reason for this particular order of letters is historical and lies in the mechanical structure of the typewriter. In the mechanical typewriter, each key was activated by a lever at the end of which was a letter. The levers were arranged so that all the letters hit the same place relative to the machine. The carriage, to which the paper is attached, moves with each tap. If two keys were pressed together or with a small time difference, the letter levers were caught in each other, which delayed the typing operation. In order to reduce this phenomenon to a minimum, the arrangement of the letters on the keyboard was designed so that letters that often appear close together, were placed on the keyboard far from each other - in separate rows. This arrangement of the keyboard was determined about 130 years ago, when Christopher Soules invented the typewriter in its familiar form today and the Remington company manufactured and put it on the market. This arrangement of the letters has been preserved throughout the years (I wish other technologies would maintain compatibility and uniform standards). The same arrangement of letters is also preserved in the keyboards of various terminals and computers.

the frequency of the letters

If the keyboard was designed on purpose not to be typed so fast, then maybe it's worth designing a keyboard that allows faster typing? That's what an American statistics professor named DVORAK (in Czech it's pronounced Dvožek, or more precisely - Dvořák) thought about seventy years ago. As a statistician, he recorded for himself the frequency of appearance of the letters in the English language and planned an arrangement of letters according to the following principles. In the middle row of letters - is the row that is the starting position of the fingers for the blind typers, the letters with the highest frequency of appearance are placed, to the left of the vowels and to the right - the most frequent consonants. Typing in this line is done almost without finger movement - only by clicking (except for the two central letters - but this movement is also relatively easy and fast). In the top row he placed the medium letters in terms of their frequency of appearance, and in the bottom row the rare letters in the English language. Move your fingers in the direction of the top row - it's easier and faster than the bottom row.

the improvement

According to the inventor of this keyboard - the DVORAK keyboard named after him, 70 percent of typing is done in the middle row of letters and 35 percent of common words in English contain letters from this row only. These are claims that can be easily tested, but Dvozek went further and claimed that his keyboard allows typing faster and with fewer errors, at an improvement rate of 35 to 50 percent and that the sum of finger movements across his keyboard is 15 times smaller than on the standard QWERTY keyboard - that is, on every A kilometer that the fingers travel while typing on a DVORAK keyboard, they will travel 15 km while typing the same text on a QWERTY keyboard. For those who type a lot, this has a noticeable effect on fatigue.

World record for typing speed

There is no disputing that the DVORAK keyboard is better than QWERTY. The world record in typing (around 170 words per minute) was achieved by DVORAK. There are crazy people for this keyboard, clubs and even a magazine dedicated to it. Computers support this keyboard character arrangement and there are also keyboards that have the DVORAK arrangement built into the hardware for use in environments that do not software support this arrangement.
Why didn't they switch to a comprehensive use of it - it seems that there is no need to explain this; Esperanto is good and efficient and yet it has not become the language spoken all over the world, although in this matter the nationalistic aspect is added.

Is it really that good?

There were those who doubted the efficiency rate of the DVORAK keyboard. In a study based on computer analysis of video footage and film of the typing process on both keyboards, it was found that the speed improvement in DVORAK is at the rate of 5 to 10 percent and not 35 to 50 percent, as exaggerated by Dvozek and his followers. As for the mileage done by the fingers - Dvorak's claim of 15 seems extremely exaggerated and in truth, according to a program written by Prof. Donald Olson and Lori Zezinski from the University of Southwestern Texas, it was found that the mileage ratio is a total of one to 1.39.

Conclusions

A common and accepted standard - taking root. It is impossible to introduce a new standard even if it has advantages, therefore when setting a standard, it is important that it be the best, also with a view to the future. 130 years ago, there were no electronics at all and no one expected then, that a day would come when the keyboard would not operate mechanical levers but electronic devices.
When someone tells you stories in praise of a certain product - don't believe them! Check, make sure and in some cases - take care of carrying out authorized tests.
Most of us (with the exception of the DVORAK-crazy ones) will continue to type on the standard QWERTY keyboard - until we see a computer on the market capable of understanding our speech and turning it into written text without errors. Such developments have been carried out for many years, but to date no reliable product has been launched that does this. However, it seems that we will still get that nowadays. And in the future... who knows, maybe we will succeed in developing an interface to the brain that can turn our verbal thinking into text and the images in our imagination into drawings on the screen and graphic files. Those with a quick mind will then laugh at the historical record of 170 words per minute.

Yadan Aryeh Seter
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