Dvorak () is a keyboard layout for Latin-script alphabets. It was patented in 1936 by August Dvorak and his brother-in-law, William Dealey, as a faster and more ergonomic alternative for typing English, compared to the 1874 QWERTY layout (the de facto standard keyboard layout). Dvorak proponents claim that it requires less finger motion and as a result reduces errors, increases typing speed, reduces repetitive strain injuries,"Alternative Keyboard Layouts" . Microsoft. Retrieved March 30, 2012. or is simply more comfortable than QWERTY.
Dvorak has failed to replace QWERTY as the most common keyboard layout, with the most pointed-to reasons being that QWERTY was popularized 60 years prior to Dvorak's creation, and that Dvorak's advantages are debated and relatively small. However, most major modern operating systems (such as Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, ChromeOS, and BSD) allow a user to switch to the Dvorak layout. The layout can be chosen for use with any hardware keyboard, regardless of the characters printed on the key caps.
Overview Dvorak was designed with the belief that it would significantly increase typing speeds with respect to the QWERTY layout by alleviating some of its perceived shortcomings, such as: Many common letter combinations require awkward finger motions. Some common letter combinations are typed with the same finger. (e.g. "ed" and "de") Many common letter combinations require a finger to jump over the home row. (e.g. "minimum") Many common letter combinations are typed with one hand while the other sits idle (e.g. was, were). Most typing is done with the left hand, which for most people is not the dominant hand. About 16% of typing is done on the lower row, 52% on the top row and only 32% on the home row.
August Dvorak studied letter frequencies and the physiology of the hand and created a new layout to alleviate the above problems, based on the following principles: Letters should be typed by alternating between hands (which makes typing more rhythmic, increases speed, reduces error, and reduces fatigue). On a Dvorak keyboard, vowels and the most used symbol characters are on the left (with the vowels on the home row), while the most used consonants are on the right, just like how the Korean Dubeolsik layout has the vowel jamo on the right and the consonant jamo on the left. For maximum speed and efficiency, the most common letters and bigrams should be typed on the home row, where the fingers rest, and under the strongest fingers. (About 70% of letter keyboard strokes on Dvorak are done on the home row and only 22% and 8% on the top and bottom rows respectively.) The least common letters should be on the bottom row which is the hardest row to reach. The right hand should do more of the typing because most people are right-handed. Bigrams should not be typed with adjacent fingers. Stroking should generally move from the edges of the board to the middle. An observation of this principle is that, for many people, when tapping fingers on a table, it is easier going from little finger to index than vice versa. This motion on a keyboard is called inboard stroke flow.
The Dvorak layout is intended for the English language, since other European languages have letter frequencies, letter sequences, and bigrams differing from those of English. Additionally, many languages have letters that do not occur in English. For non-English use, these differences lessen the alleged advantages of the original Dvorak keyboard. However, the Dvorak principles have been applied to the design of keyboards for other languages, though the primary keyboards used by most countries are based on the QWERTY design.
The layout was completed in 1932 and granted in 1936. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) designated the Dvorak keyboard as an alternative standard keyboard layout in 1982 (INCITS 207-1991 R2007; previously X4.22-1983, X3.207:1991), "Alternate Keyboard Arrangement for Alphanumeric Machines". The original ANSI Dvorak layout was available as a factory-supplied option on the original IBM Selectric typewriter.
Features
August Dvorak was an educational psychologist and professor of education at the University of Washington in Seattle. Touch typing had come into wide use by that time and Dvorak became interested in the layout while serving as an advisor to Gertrude Ford, who was writing her master's thesis on typing errors. He quickly concluded that the QWERTY layout needed to be replaced, as QWERTY had not been laid out with the pure intention of ease and speed. Dvorak was joined by his brother-in-law William Dealey, a professor of education at the then North Texas State Teacher's College in Denton, Texas.
Dvorak and Dealey's objective was to scientifically design a keyboard to decrease typing errors, speed up typing, and lessen typist fatigue. They engaged in extensive research while designing their keyboard layout. In 1914 and 1915, Dealey attended seminars on the science of motion and later reviewed slow-motion films of typists with Dvorak. Dvorak and Dealey meticulously studied the English language, researching the most used letters and letter combinations. They also studied the physiology of the hand. The result in 1932 was the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard.Cassingham 1986, pp. 32–35
In 1893, George Blickensderfer had developed a keyboard layout for the Blickensderfer typewriter model 5 that used the letters DHIATENSOR for the home row. Blickensderfer had determined that 85% of English words contained these letters. The Dvorak keyboard uses the same letters in its home row, apart from replacing R with U, and even keeps the consonants in the same order, but moves the vowels to the left: AOEUIDHTNS.
In 1933, Dvorak started entering typists trained on his keyboard into the International Commercial Schools Contest, which was a typing contest sponsored by typewriter manufacturers consisting of a series of professional and amateur contests. The professional contests had typists sponsored by typewriter companies to advertise their machines.
In the 1930s, the Tacoma, Washington, school district ran an experimental program in typing designed by Dvorak to determine whether to hold Dvorak layout classes. The experiment put 2,700 high school students through Dvorak typing classes and found that students learned Dvorak in one-third the time it took to learn QWERTY. When a new school board was elected, however, it chose to terminate the Dvorak classes. During World War II, while in the Navy, Dvorak conducted experiments which he claimed showed that typists could be retrained to Dvorak in a mere 10 days, though he discarded at least two previous studies which were conducted and whose results are unknown.
With such great apparent gains, interest in the Dvorak keyboard layout increased by the early 1950s. Numerous businesses and government organizations began to consider retraining their typists on Dvorak keyboards. In this environment, the General Services Administration commissioned Earle Strong to determine whether the switch from QWERTY to Dvorak should be made. After retraining a selection of typists from QWERTY to Dvorak, once the Dvorak group had regained their previous typing speed (which took 100 hours of training, more than was claimed in Dvorak's Navy test), Strong took a second group of QWERTY typists chosen for equal ability to the Dvorak group and retrained them in QWERTY in order to improve their speed at the same time the Dvorak typists were training.
The carefully controlled study failed to show any benefit to the Dvorak keyboard layout in typing or training speed. Strong recommended speed training with QWERTY rather than switching keyboards, and attributed the previous apparent benefits of Dvorak to improper experimental design and outright bias on the part of Dvorak, who had designed and directed the previous studies. However, Strong had a personal grudge against Dvorak and had made public statements before his study opposing new keyboard designs. After this study, interest in the Dvorak keyboard waned. Later experiments have shown that many keyboard designs, including some alphabetical ones, allow very similar typing speeds to QWERTY and Dvorak when typists have been trained for them, suggesting that Dvorak's careful design principles may have had little effect because keyboard layout is only a small part of the complicated physical activity of typing.
The work of Dvorak paved the way for other optimized keyboard layouts for English such as Colemak, but also for other languages such as the German Neo and the French BÉPO.
Original layout
Over the decades, symbol keys were shifted around the keyboard resulting in variations of the Dvorak design. In 1982, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) implemented a standard for the Dvorak layout known as ANSI X4.22-1983. This standard gave the Dvorak layout official recognition as an alternative to the QWERTY keyboard.Cassingham 1986, pp. 35–37
The layout standardized by the ANSI differs from the original or "classic" layout devised and promulgated by Dvorak. Indeed, the layout promulgated publicly by Dvorak differed slightly from the layout for which Dvorak & Dealey applied for a patent in 1932most notably in the placement of Z. Today's keyboards have more keys than the original typewriter did, and other significant differences existed: The numeric keys of the classic Dvorak layout are ordered: 7531902468 (an order used today in the "Programmer Dvorak" layout) In the classic Dvorak layout, the question mark key ? is in the leftmost position of the upper row, while the slash key / is in the rightmost position of the upper row For the classic Dvorak layout, the following symbols share keys (the second symbol being printed when the [shift] key is pressed): colon : and question mark ? ampersand & and slash /
Modern U.S. Dvorak layouts almost always place ; and : together on a single key, and / and ? together on a single key. Thus, if the keycaps of a modern keyboard are rearranged so that the unshifted symbol characters match the classic Dvorak layout, then the result is the ANSI Dvorak layout.
Availability in operating systems Dvorak is included with all major operating systems (such as Windows, macOS, Linux, and BSD).
Early PCs Although some word processors could simulate alternative keyboard layouts by software, this was application specific; if more than one program was commonly used (e.g., a word processor and a spreadsheet), the user could be forced to switch layouts depending on the application. Occasionally, stickers were provided to place over the keys for these layouts.
However, IBM-compatible PCs used an active, "smart" keyboard. Striking a key generated a key "code", which was sent to the computer. Thus, changing to an alternative keyboard layout was accomplished most easily by simply buying a keyboard with the new layout. Because the key codes were generated by the keyboard itself, all software would respond accordingly. In the mid to late 1980s, a small industry for replacement PC keyboards developed; although most of these were concerned with keyboard "feel" and/or programmable macros, there were several with alternative layouts, such as Dvorak.
Amiga Amiga operating systems from the 1986 version 1.2 onward allow the user to modify the keyboard layout by using the setmap command line utility with "usa2" as an argument, or later in 3.x systems by opening the keyboard input preference widget and selecting "Dvorak". Amiga systems versions 1.2 and 1.3 came with the Dvorak keymap on the Workbench disk. Versions 2.x came with the keymaps available on the "Extras" disk. In 3.0 and 3.1 systems, the keymaps were on the "Storage" disk. By copying the respective keymap to the Workbench disk or installing the system to a hard drive, Dvorak was usable for Workbench application programs.
Microsoft Windows