It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly.

It’s QWERTY versus Dvorak and the fight is getting ugly. That is, as ugly as a keyboard layout melee can get.

A little background: The first typewriter’s keyboard was arranged in alphabetical order, which proved to be poor design when two keys near each other were pressed in succession. The keys would jam. So inventor Christopher Sholes shuffled the letters around, placing the most commonly used keys away from each other. Thus, the QWERTY keyboard was born.

But there’s another keyboard layout, the Dvorak, which is not widely used. The Dvorak has been around since the 1930s, when an efficiency-minded inventor named August Dvorak placed the most commonly used letters, like vowels, on the “home row” (on a QWERTY, the home row starts with ASDF… and ends at single and double quotes).

Dvorak users contend that this arrangement enables users to type much faster. According to the WSJ article, one user said on a QWERTY he types 40 WPM; on a Dvorak, he types 110. Still, it took 46 years (in 1982) after the layout was patented for the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) to designate it as an official alternative to QWERTY.

Back to the present.

With the proliferation of full-keyboard mobile phones, Dvorak disciples are getting angrier and angrier. See, most computer operating systems allow you to change your keyboard layout to Dvorak. You just need to modify your keyboard to match (either by switching buttons or by adding labels). But with smart phones, the few ways to get an alternate layout are with extensions, third-party utilities or jailbreaking.

So here’s the “awfully relevant” part. The Dvorak keyboard isn’t just a snake oil keyboard making outrageous typing-speed claims; it’s the result of years of scientific research including letter frequencies and hand physiology. It’s also the only other keyboard layout besides QWERTY that’s been approved by ANSI.

If it delivers such a high level of efficiency, why isn’t it the standard, or at least close to it?

There are many factors keeping Dvorak down, and chief among them is the cost and effort it would require to train and retrain. And with the said proliferation of smart phones, it’s only going to stay that way.

That’s what I call legacy inefficiency. (Jen Darr)

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