AZERTY amélioré: computational design on a national scale Anna Feit, Mathieu Nancel, Maximilian John, Andreas Karrenbauer, Daryl Weir, Antti Oulasvirta
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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
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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 Computational 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.