Get 'Hands-On' With Alternative Keyboards

For bold system builders and users, third-party keyboards now exist that can make up for Qwerty's drawbacks. Some condition the user to their improve touch-typing using Qwerty, while others dispense with the Qwerty layout altogether.

System builders who include such unique keyboards to their products and services catalog can offer increased value to customers, at least customers who are open to unconventional alternatives. One caveat, however: You will have to work personally with these alternative keyboards before you can proficiently offer advice about them. They're not intuitive—but then, neither is typing on a standard keyboard.

In this Recipe I review three representative examples of alternative keyboards: ergonomic, training, and a non-Qwerty.

Microsoft's Ergonomic Keyboard

When it comes to better comfort, I recommend you check out the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 from Microsoft. It sells through retailers for around $50.

Microsoft did a great job designing this unit ergonomically. For starters, the layout is divided into two banks of keys, as you can see in this photo:

The two banks are slanted 24 degrees away from each other to accommodate the angle of the user's wrists as they reach the keyboard from the sides of their body. Also, the two banks of keys slope upwards towards the center in a 14-degree gable, to reduce the rotation of the user's wrists.

There's a detachable foot under the front of the unit to give the keyboard a 7-degree downward slope toward the front of the unit. This is said to be more natural when used on a comparatively low table, when the user's arms will be sloping downward. This slope can also be removed to let the keyboard lay flat. Folding feet in the front of the unit to produce a conventional upward tilt, which is supposed to be better when used on a comparatively high table, when the user's arms will be sloping upward. There's also a sizeable wrist rest pad for comfort and reduced strain.

When pushing the keys on Microsoft's unit, I found the response comfortable and quiet, as if the idea was to cushion the fingers.

Beyond ergonomics, there are customizable hot keys, a zoom slider on the ridge between the two banks of keys, and back and forward buttons for Internet browser control. Incidentally, these last features require you to first install driver software from a CD.

While this keyboard was certainly comfortable, I found touch-typing to be rather uncomfortable. The keyboard's layout modifications were just enough to throw me off. I found myself looking at my hands the whole time to make sure they were placed correctly. While typing got easier with practice, even after a week, my typing speed was still about a sixth slower than with a clunky, noisy, non-ergonomic keyboard.

To be sure, there are plenty of people out there who don't touch-type. For them, typing is automatically tiring. The Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 should reduce their fatigue. Also, a boss (your customer) who supplies such a unit will be demonstrating concern and reasonable care for the welfare of his or her office workers, and perhaps mitigate the impact of any future repetitive stress injury lawsuits. For that, the unit's price of just $50 is a bargain. Metadot's Keyboard for Training

For enabling a person to touch-type, I recommend going with the Das Keyboard, which can be acquired from its manufacturer, Metadot Corp. for just under $90. What's unique about the Das Keyboard is clear in the photo below. That's right, all the keys are blank.

Don't laugh—when you learn to touch-type, you're not supposed look at the keyboard while typing. Instead, you should be looking at the text that is being produced on the screen. The simplest way to train a person to not look at the keyboard is to give them nothing to look at on the keys themselves! That's exactly what Das Keyboard does. It essentially forces the user to either sink or swim.

Realistically, though, most users will need some prompting to get started. Taping a picture of a Qwerty layout just below the monitor, but above the keyboard, seems to be the ticket. That way, the user can check the positioning of their fingers without looking at the keyboard. While the F and J keys of Das Keyboard are cupped deeper than the others to give a user a tactile clue of where their fingers are, such subtleties were lost on my conditioned digits.

No Qwerty layout came with the keyboard, so I propped an old keyboard under the monitor as a guide. That provided sufficient prompting.

My first try with the Das Keyboard generated only a screenful of gibberish. But after relaxing and doing a little adjusting, I was pleased to find I could proceed at full speed. I found that I was weak on a few keys on the lower right, but the Das Keyboard forced me to confront that weakness and work to improve my typing. Indeed, after a week of using Das Keyboard, I found that my personal typing speed had increased by nearly 10 percent.

However, part of the improvement may be attributable to the sink-or-swim environment. With speed tests involving pure text, it was not only possible but almost necessary to enter a Zen-like state in which the text simply flowed and typing performance was optimal. But in the real world, text is intermixed with numbers, idiosyncratic punctuation, and control characters—not to mention phone calls and other common interruptions. All this brought my Zen state to a crashing halt, and I was reduced to jabbing at what I could only hope were the right keys.

Meanwhile, inputting passwords, which are displayed only as bullets, was like walking a tightrope without a net. I never felt absolutely certain that I was pressing the right keys.

For these reasons, I cannot recommend the Das Keyboard for production use. But for personal use by someone who wants to learn touch-typing, you literally will end up touch-typing or not managing to produce any text at all.

For more on the Das Keyboard, see page 3 of this previous TechBuilder Recipe: Portable Gizmos for System Builders. New Standard's Non-Qwerty Keyboard

For weaning a typist off the cumbersome Qwerty keyboard method, I recommend the silver and black NSK 535 S, which can be had for just under $70 from its developer, New Standard Keyboards. The firm also offers a color-coded unit with the same layout.

Since 1936, the main alternative to Qwerty has been the Dvorak layout, in which the most common letters are placed on the middle row. Once you get used to the Dvorak keyboard, it's very fast. In fact, the world record in typing speed was achieved with a Dvorak unit. Yet the layout, at first glance, is seemingly as arbitrary as that of the Qwerty keyboard. As a result, the Dvorak keyboard remains a niche item.

The NSK 535 S attempts to get away from Qwerty without resorting go the Dvorak layout. In fact, the NSK's layout is both non-arbitrary and quite accessible. The layout is refreshingly straightforward and so logical, it would most definitely appeal to Star Trek's Mr. Spock: The keys are laid out in alphabetical order, starting with ABCD in the top left. As you can see in the photo below, the letters A to M are on the left, and N to Z are on the right. Navigation and shift keys are in the middle:

The NSK 535 S also has fewer keys than a standard keyboard—many fewer. Using special shift keys, each key produces as many as six responses: lower case, upper case, numbers or ordinals, symbols or less common punctuation, special function keys or additional symbols and numeric keypad emulation. This reduces the number of keys to 53 from the standard 104.

Also, this keyboard is small and compact. It measures just 4.5 inches deep by 12.2 inches long, as opposed to a standard 6.5 inches by 18 inches.

Alas, the NSK 535 S is not easy to adapt to. After using the keyboard for an hour, I was still typing at about mosquito-swatting speed. I had to visually sight each key before pressing it. The fact that they were in alphabetical order only indicated which side of the keyboard to look on for a particular key (A to M being on the left).

After four hours (over several days) of working with New Standard's keyboard, I did become acclimated to the layout. I even mastered the patterns involved in typing a few common words. At that point, I was typing at about 20 words per minute, or the classic untrained hunt-and-peck speed.

Basically, the ABCD layout proved to be no less workable than the Qwerty or the Dvorak layout. But obviously, a layout only makes sense when your fingers press the correct keys. Thanks to years of conditioning, Qwerty simply makes sense to my fingers. Trying to use the ABCD layout was, in a word, agony. Switching to this layout offered me no obvious benefits commensurate with the painful downtime.

While the keyboard's use of key combinations to reduce the number of keys did make the unit smaller, it didn't speed up my typing. For instance, making Number-Backspace the equivalent to Delete eliminated the need for a Delete key, but I believe that simply pressing Delete would be faster and certainly easier to remember. Sadly, the makers place the "cheat sheet" listing the key combination equivalents on the underside of the keyboard, where it was hardly convenient. In fact, I didn't even notice it initially.

On the other hand (pun intended), learning the ABCD layout in no way interfered with either my Qwerty typing conditioning or my overall typing performance. The two are separate modes; learning one did not mean unlearning the other.

Having said all that, there are plenty of people who are neither Qwerty touch-typists nor planning to become one. They will not balk at a new layout, and ABCD will be appealingly less arbitrary than Qwerty.

The ABCD keyboard would seem more suited to environments where speed typing is not such an issue, or where a keyboard layout isn't known in advance—perhaps for a beginner or a novice. Or, for example, if you're marketing lab equipment overseas, you might want to include a small control keyboard that doesn't assume Qwerty conditioning. Using the ABCD unit, users in Mongolia or Yemen could manage to reply to screen prompts as long as they were acquainted with the Roman alphabet. In fact, they could probably manage it faster than with a Qwerty unit.

In the end, it's important to realize there is no perfect keyboard; they all require training and practice. But there are alternatives to the standard issue Qwerty units that come with PCs. They have features that may prove valuable to specific users, while adding value to a system builder's business proposition. The key is making customers aware of alternative keyboards and the advantages they can offer.

LAMONT WOOD is a freelance writer in San Antonio, Texas, who has been covering technology for nearly a quarter of a century.