AN IMPROVED ARABIC KEYBOARD LAYOUT

One of the most important human?machine interaction (HMI) systems is the computer keyboard. The keyboard layout (KL) dictates how a person interacts with a physical keyboard through the way in which the letters, numbers, punctuation marks, and symbols are mapped and arranged on the keyboard. Mapping letters onto the keys of a keyboard is complex because many issues need to be taken into considerations, such as the nature of the language, finger fatigue, hand balance, typing speed, and distance traveled by fingers during typing and finger movements. There are two main kinds of KL: English and Arabic. Although numerous research studies have proposed different layouts for the English keyboard, there is a lack of research studies that focus on the Arabic KL. To address this lack, this study analyzed and clarified the limitations of the standard legacy Arabic KL. Then an efficient Arabic KL was proposed to overcome the limitations of the current KL. The frequency of Arabic letters and bi-gram probabilities were measured on a large Arabic corpus in order to assess the current KL and to design the improved Arabic KL. The improved Arabic KL was then evaluated and compared against the current KL in terms of letter frequency, finger-travel distance, hand and finger balance, bi-gram frequency, row distribution, and most frequent words. The comparisons proved that the improved Arabic KL was able to outperform the current KL. Based on these results, some conclusions are made and a number of recommendations for future work are suggested.