Which keyboard keys are internationally available and easily accessed? [closed]

Question

When developing software for public use, it is important to ensure that it is designed with consideration for a variety of setups.

How much does the keyboard vary across different layouts? Can all characters be relied on to exist? Like the backtick:

`

And can keys such as the backtick be easily reached by all users?

I'm unable to find a resource that gives thorough information on this.

Sabbatical

It is operating system and computer specific. Some computers don't have any keyboards. Others can have the keyboard layout be changed during runtime (e.g. with X11), i.e. when your application is running. – Carrico

Look into Fitts Law, from my own typing experience i would say that shift, alt and space are always available in some form or another. For more information on charsets it'd be useful to look into UTF8 and how they are compiled. – Duer

In regards to being put on hold: Although I agree that this is technically asking for a resource (or a resourceful answer, anyway), I still think its fairly important. I could have asked specifically about the backtick or something, but I think the general problem deserves a broad and helpful answer and I think this is the best place for it. – Sabbatical

Answer 1

I was working on a similar project few weeks ago, there are a few tips that might be usefull for you:

1. First ensure that your app will be able to hand those characters, using an encoding like UTF-8 to take from arabic to russian characters.

2. The users are very comfortable so make sure to give them different options like:

   1. You can simply map the keys that are not common between all keyboard layouts like ñ á ç to keyboard shortcuts like Shift+n = ñ

   2. If your app does relly on physical touch keyboard give a look to Swift Key keyboard, an android app that lets the user pick the layout, spanish layout now:

and with a swipe on the language you can chose another language of your choice:

notice the layout changed as ñ is not there anymore.

3. Or maybe even easier for users, do a shortcut so that a panel with all the missing characters from the actual user keyboard layout appear so they can press them with a click (inserting the clicked character to cursor position).

Uric

Answer 2

Other answers cover the some of the range of layouts you could be faced with trying to make your input only the lowest common denominator. I think you can't trust what the user might have on their keyboard. The options are so wide. For most software you can make assumptions but that isn't 100% coverage.

One thing many developers add is the ability to map the keys to the function. For instance WSAD or the arrow keys for moving a game character is common and the player can choose one of these options or any other keys they wish.

Rather than worry about what they have, try to support a wide range of characters and let the user map their keys.

Corbitt

I think this is a good/best answer in most cases, but I believe there are some applications (writing a programming language?) where one cannot practically remap characters. – Sabbatical

I do agree with what you are saying, and that is where making assumptions comes in. In a programming language you might choose U.S. English as your standard, covering the common keyboard types around the world in the characters used. This is more of a design pattern for some situations. – Corbitt

Answer 3

There is a way that one could perform an analysis of all of the available keyboard layouts somewhat easily, at least on a Linux system, though the same general method could be transferred to other operating system varieties.

Downloading/creating a huge raw database of the available keyboard layout available for different computing devices would take some work and backend storage space but probably not too much of the latter as keyboard layout files are relatively small.

Once the files are in place keymap files are all pretty similar, so writing a python script (or some other language if you prefer) to parse out the relevant information and store it in a common database/groups of files/whatever way you prefer to deal with the data.

Once the data has been cleaned up finding commonalities, groupings, etc is just a matter of some set mathematics, which computers are really good at. There is a whole tag on the math.stackexchange.com site for dealing with this type. The CPP Standard Template Library even has a Set Template that could be quite useful.

I can write some code to extract the info from the keymaps on my Linux development machine, but depending on the target devices that may not be particularly useful.

It may also be beneficial to check in the Data Science Stack Exchange to see if there are any problems that are similar enough that the same techniques could be used for analyzing keyboard layouts. This seems like the sort of problem that would be well suited for that community.

Uird

Answer 4

I don't believe you will find a good article to tell you the most commonly used characters among different layouts in percentages. However there are 2 ways to look into this and make a very reasonable guess.

• Historically

Historically speaking the most common keyboard layouts are QWERTY and AZERTY. They all share a very big common thing - they are highly based on the ASCII table (In terms of characters, not letters). Almost every single one in different countries has a set of special characters (£ in UK/Ireland, ¿ in Spain, etc.) but generally they share a large number of common ones such as brackets ()[]{}, percentage %, star *, etc. In other words, if it is in the ASCII set of characters, it is most certainly accessible either directly or with a shortcut on most keyboards.

• Linguistically

From this point of view, most (~all) keyboards have the very basic and internationally accepted punctuation characters - dot ., dash - (underscore), coma ,, exclamation mark !, all math symbols +-%/ (careful with backslash), etc. You can rely that these will be available for virtually any layout (until you come across Hebrew layout of course - then you are into some awesome looking characters on top of these).

I don't know if this was the answer you were looking for but hope it gives you some ideas on what path to go when choosing special characters to use.

Ducky

Answer 5

For the best results limit your choices to the most basic punctuation -,.?! and math +-*/=%() symbols.

Scroll through the keyboards illustrated here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout
and see if your symbol is easily found on all (or most) of them and it is on the left side of the key when a key has more than two symbols on it - otherwise AltGr or some other exotic modifier key has to be used for the symbol.

Broadleaf

Answer 6

If you are looking for shortcut keys, you must know what is the OS going to use. This is a primary thing, but must remember. These two threads will help you with Windows and Linux based OS.

Kershaw

Answer 7

I would say ASCII 32-126, with the exception of ` (back tick 96) ^ (caret 94) and ~ (tilde 126) should be available on most keyboards cross the world.

Further \ (back slash) is displayed as a Yen mark on on most Japanese keyboards and screens, but still functions as back slash in paths etc.

Ting