Typing without keys

The computer keyboard, implicated in thousands of repetitive strain injuries among office workers, may spur a revival of the hunt-and-peck typing method of two-finger typists. This revival may take place on keyboards without keys-- or rather, keyboards with virtual keys displayed on a computer screen.

Intended for users whose disabilities that prevent the operation of a physical (or hardware) keyboard, onscreen keyboards provide a picture of a conventional keyboard with "keys" that can be selected with a mouse, trackball, pen, or other input device. Some onscreen-keyboard software, like WiViK (WIndows VIsual Keyboard) from Toronto's Bloorview MacMillan Centre, can be customized to show not only a standard QWERTY layout but punctuation symbols, accented characters, or even entire words; clicking one of these virtual keys causes the appropriate keystrokes to be entered, just as if the corresponding keys had been pressed on a hardware keyboard.

In this way, one click can take the place of tens or hundreds of keystrokes-- a capability of value not only to disabled persons but to nondisabled computer users rendered functionally disabled by environmental conditions or some other exogenous factor. At the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station in Ontario, for example, workers conducting equipment surveys, or "walkdowns," in radioactive areas are required to wear several sets of protective clothing, including two or three layers of plastic gloves-- enough of an impediment to make typing on a hardware keyboard or even handwriting on a Newton-style pen computer impractical and unreliable. Instead, spacesuited workers use WiViK on a pen computer (itself wrapped in a protective vinyl bag) to fill in computerized forms on the condition of various items throughout the facility. Instead of typing or handwriting, all that is necessary is to tap the screen-- a shortcut known as "point and shoot."

But in that example the possible entries on the computerized form are limited; it is relatively easy to display a WiViK button for every available option. More difficult is the task of typing conventional English (or some other language) using an onscreen keyboard. While handwriting recognition has been presented as the definitive technology for typing without keys (or at least the most sexy one), in fact faster and more accurate text entry is possible when onscreen keyboards are teamed with the technology of word prediction, which functions on the premise that typing a word determines what subsequent words are likely.

Word prediction is familiar to anyone who has witnessed physicist Stephen Hawking at the helm of his voice synthesizer/word processor, dubbed the Equalizer: Hawking is presented with a list of likely words (narrowed down from a much larger list based on his own usage and the words' frequency in English), from which he selects candidates and peruses through a list of likely subsequent words until a sentence is finished. (Some common sentences, like "Please switch on the desk computer," are also available.) As a last resort, Hawking can type out a word letter-by-letter.

With onscreen keyboards, the procedure is reversed: Type a letter of the alphabet and word-prediction software proposes candidate words beginning with that letter. As more and more characters are typed, the possibilities narrow; once the desired word is predicted, a simple mouse click or tap of a pen causes the word to be entered, and then likely subsequent words are predicted. Type Uni and "United" will be suggested; select that word and "States" will pop up as a possible next predicted word. Users can read in computer files of their typical word usage, or the prediction software will simply learn the user's word patterns on the fly.

Word-prediction software, such as WiViK's optional Rate Enhancement Package or Telepathic from Madenta Communications in Edmonton, Alberta, works better still in languages where gender (masculine, feminine, neuter) or other overt case marking classifies words into discrete categories: Type la in French and roughly half the possible subsequent words are ruled out, though of course the system has less predictive power with words beginning with l'. And word predictors are too young a technology to have knowledge of meaning: Linguist Noam Chomsky's famous locution "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously"-- grammatically correct but semantically anomalous-- would not necessarily be ruled out by word-prediction software.