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Extended Bangla Keyboard

Corresponding Author : M. R. Selim (selim@sust.edu)

Keywords : Keyboard layout, Keystrokes, Typing time, Finger travelling distance, Bangla input method

Abstract :

Bangla language has a big size character set. To fit all the characters within the existing keyboards, all the Bangla fixed keyboard layouts use several typing layers. Since using characters of a non-default typing layer requires pressing an extra key, it slows down the overall typing speed significantly. In this paper, to reduce the effect of multilayer typing, we propose to add some extra keys in the keyboards used by the Bangla language users. We show quantitatively the efficiency improvement of using such extended keyboards using various metrics. The metrics make use of the character frequency statistics derived from a corpus consisting of more than 250 million Bangla words. Our analysis shows that it is possible to save more than 8% keystrokes and 20% typing time and finger movements by adding only 6 extra keys in the currently used Bijoy keyboard. 

Published on June 30th, 2014 in Volume 21, Issue 1, Applied Sciences and Technology