The QWERTY keyboard revisited.
It's been awhile since we've featured a user-submitted photo from our All Tech Flickr Pool. Today we selected a photo of a keyboard at the Singapore National Library. Singapore has four official languages (English, Malay, Chinese, and Tamil), two of which are not based in a strict-form alphabet system. Do Singaporeans use a QWERTY keyboard too?
Yes. The QWERTY keyboard is far-and-away the world standard, but every time I travel abroad using an internet cafe, I'm impressed to see variations on that standard. And it's not just displaced shift and alt keys, some Qwerty keyboards in foreign countries lack certain punctuation or letters. The reason for that is because the keyboard is programmable and in other countries, those keys are assigned to different characters in a different language. Some paste other characters, strokes, or symbols on their physical keys to identify the alternatively-programmed key's function. Even still, there may be multiple input methods for the same language. Chinese, for instance, can be inputted in a number of different styles that use the english alphabet or an overlay of strokes all on a QWERTY keyboard.
So next time you read an email from a friend traveling abroad, cut them some slack for their jumbled messages. Typing from a often dimly lit cyber cafe anywhere from Laos to Israel, their keyboard may be more unfamiliar than you think.
Comments
Discussions for this story are now closed. Please see the Community FAQ for more information.