AZERTY amélioré: computational design on a national scale Anna Feit, Mathieu Nancel, Maximilian John, Andreas Karrenbauer, Daryl Weir, Antti Oulasvirta To cite this version: Anna Feit, Mathieu Nancel, Maximilian John, Andreas Karrenbauer, Daryl Weir, et al.. AZERTY amélioré: computational design on a national scale. Communications of the ACM, Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, 64 (2), pp.48-58. 10.1145/3382035. hal-03136124 HAL Id: hal-03136124 https://hal.inria.fr/hal-03136124 Submitted on 9 Feb 2021 HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access L’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents entific research documents, whether they are pub- scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, lished or not. The documents may come from émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de teaching and research institutions in France or recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires abroad, or from public or private research centers. publics ou privés. contributed articles DOI:10.1145/3382035 A new French keyboard standard is the first designed with the help of computational methods. BY ANNA MARIA FEIT, MATHIEU NANCEL, MAXIMILIAN JOHN, ANDREAS KARRENBAUER, DARYL WEIR, AND ANTTI OULASVIRTA AZERTY amélioré: Computational Design on a National Scale IN 2015, FRANCE’S Ministry of Culture wrote to the are unsupported. Similar-looking char- 4 acters can be used in place of some French Parliament criticizing the lack of standards missing ones, as with “ for “, or ae for æ. for a keyboard layout. It pointed out that azerty, Users often rely on software-driven au- the traditional layout, lacks special characters needed tocompletion or autocorrection for these. Also, they insert rarely used char- for “proper” French and that many variants exist. acters via Alt codes, from menus, or by The national organization for standardization, AFNOR, copy-pasting from elsewhere. The min- 5 istry was concerned that this hinders was tasked with producing a standard. We joined this proper use of the language. For exam- project in 2016 as experts in text entry and optimization. ple, some French people were taught, THE FRENCH LANGUAGE uses accents (for example, incorrectly, that accents for capital let- ters (for example, É, À) are optional, a é, à, î), ligatures (œ and æ), and specific apostrophes belief sometimes justified by reference and quotation marks (for example,’ « » “ ”). Some are to their absence from azerty. This article reports experiences and awkward to reach or even unavailable with azerty insights from a national-scale effort at (Figure 1), and many characters used in French dialects redesigning and standardizing the spe- 48 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | FEBRUARY 2021 | VOL. 64 | NO. 2 cial-character layout of azerty with socio-technical endeavors. The goals the aid of combinatorial optimization. and decisions evolved considerably key insights Coming from computer science, our throughout the three-year project. ˽ France is the first country in the world starting point was the known formula- Many stakeholders were involved, with to adopt a keyboard standard informed tion of keyboard design as a classical various fields of expertise, and the by computational methods, improving 2 19,20 the performance, ergonomics, and optimization problem, although no public was consulted. A key take- intuitiveness of the keyboard while computationally designed keyboard away from this case is that algorithmic enabling input of many more characters. thus far has been adopted as a nation- methods must operate in an interac- ˽ We describe a human-centric approach wide standard. The specific design task tive, iterative, and participatory man- developed jointly with stakeholders is shown in Figure 2. Going beyond ner, aiding in defining, exploring, de- to utilize computational methods in prior work, our goal was not only to en- ciding, and finalizing the design in a the decision process not only to solve a well-defined problem but also to sure high typing performance but also multi-stakeholder project. understand the design requirements, to consider ergonomics and learnabil- In this article, we discuss how inter- to inform subjective views, or to ity factors. active tools were used to find a jointly communicate the outcomes. However, the typical “one-shot” agreed definition of what makes a good ˽ To be more broadly useful, research view of optimization, in which a user keyboard layout: familiarity versus user must develop computational methods that can be used in a participatory and defines a problem and selects a solver, performance, expanded character sets inclusive fashion respecting the different ILLUSTRATION BY MATT HERRING MATT BY ILLUSTRATION offers poor support for such complex versus discoverability, and support for needs and roles of stakeholders. FEBRUARY 2021 | VOL. 64 | NO. 2 | COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM 49 contributed articles everyday language versus programming sential not only to solve a well-stated algorithmic tools, revealing important or regional dialects. Interactive tools are design problem but also to understand opportunities for research to better also needed to elicit subjective prefer- it and to communicate and appreciate support participatory use. ences11 and to help stakeholders under- its final outcomes. They are needed to stand the consequences of their choices. elicit and inform subjective views, and Goals for Revising AZERTY Although only time will tell whether to resolve conflicts and support con- The AFNOR committee concerned the new layout is adopted, one can sensus by presenting the best compro- with the development of a standard for draw several lessons from this case. mises achievable. This yields a vastly the French keyboard was composed of Com putational methods become es- different picture of optimization and Ministry of Culture representatives Figure 1. The old AZERTY layout. Try typing « À l’évidence, l’œnologie est plus qu’un ‘hobby’. » (“Evidently, wine-making is more than a ‘hobby’.”) Hint: the underlined characters are not present, such as nonbreaking spaces and curved apostrophes. 1234567890°+ 2 &é~" #{'([¦-è‘_ \ ç^à@ )]= } AZERTYUIOP¨£ aze€ rtyu iopˆ $ QSDFGHJKLM% qsdfgh jklmù* >WXCVBN? ./§ <sxcvbn ,;:! Figure 2. The computational goal was to assign the special characters to the available keyslots such that the keyboard is easy to use and typing French is fast and ergonomic. The process saw the set of characters change frequently; in (a), the set in the final layout is shown (the last 24 characters displayed were not part of the optimization problem but added later). @# à§é ´ è ` ê&()[]‘’_—«“‹»”›’ " ° ˆ¨æÆ£ €®{ ™ −-+ ±† √ ‡ ßß$ / | ∞ /\÷ * ½×<>≤≥ =©çÇ.? ¿,!¡:... · ; ˙˘ ,˝ ˚-¯ˇ· ˜ ˛¸ ¼≠− ÀÈÊ ¯ ‚ ÉZZ (a) Example set of special characters (107). In red are diacritic marks; entered via dead keys; see pane d. 1234567890 BACKSPACE TAB A ZERTYUIOP ENTER CAPS QSDFGHJKLM LOCK SHIFT WX CVBN SHIFT CTRL WIN ALT ALT GR WIN R-CLICK CTRL SPACEBAR (b) The set of keyslots (129), with green for free keyslots and blue for modifier keys to access each of the four slots per key. Shift Alt + Shift = ≠ + = à ` a ; None Alt (d) Diacritics work as dead keys: visible output is produced (c) Each key offers four keyslots accessible via modifier keys. upon subsequent input of a letter. 50 COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM | FEBRUARY 2021 | VOL. 64 | NO. 2 contributed articles and experts in ergonomics, typogra- intermediate solutions, priorities up- phy, human-computer interaction, lin- dates, public requests, and so on. We guistics, and keyboard manufacturing. detail these changes in the later text. A typical standardization process in- volves meetings to iterate over each as- Keyboard Design as pect of the standard and its wording. Despite having an Optimization Problem Final drafts are opened to public com- to add many new The arrangement of characters in a ment on which the committee then it- layout is a very challenging computa- erates if need be. At the start of the characters, we tional problem. Formally, one must as- project, we took these meetings as an strove to keep sign characters to the keyboard keys opportunity to understand the require- and to keyslots accessible via modifier ments of the design problem from a the layout usable, keys. Each assignment involves three human-centered perspective. We then challenging considerations. We here formulated them in a way that enabled ergonomic, and discuss the computational problem modeling and solving the problem us- easy to use. before opening up approaches to mak- ing optimization. ing them useful in a multi-stakeholder Our task was to develop an improved design project. layout for all so-called “special charac- Firstly, what is a “good” placement? ters”, that is, every character that is not Ergonomics and motor performance a nonaccented letter of the Latin alpha- should be central goals. More common bet (“AZERTYUIOP…”), a digit, or the characters should be assigned to keys space bar. The list of special characters that minimize risks of health issues to be made accessible was greatly aug- such as repetitive strain injury and mented compared to the traditional that are quickly accessed. However, azerty layout, to facilitate the typing of people differ in how they type.7 There all characters used in the French lan- is no standard model that can be used guage and its dialects,a modern com- as an objective function. Also, time puter use (especially programming and spent visually seeking a character social media), and scientific and math- should be minimized through, for ex- ematical characters (for example, Greek ample, placing characters where peo- letters), alongside major currency sym- ple assume they are,14 and grouping bols and all characters in Europe’s characters that are considered similar. other Latin-alphabet languages. Secondly, which level of language to Despite having to add many new char- favor is tricky to know in advance and, acters, we strove to keep the layout as we learned, a politically loaded ques- usable, ergonomic, and easy to learn. tion. To decide where to put #, we must There were several challenging re- weigh the importance of programming quirements (Figure 2).