Designing Soft Keyboards for Brahmic Scripts
Lauren Hinkle, Miguel Lezcano, Jugal Kumar Kalita · 2010
Despite being spoken by a large percentage of the world, many Indic languages have escaped research and development in the realm of text-input. There exist languages with poor or no support for typing. Soft keyboards, because of their ease of installation and lack of reliance on specific hardware, are a promising solution as an input device for many languages. Developing an acceptable soft keyboard requires frequency analysis of characters in order to design a layout that minimizes text-input time. This paper proposes using various development techniques, layout variations, and evaluation methods for soft keyboard creation for Brahmic scripts. We propose that using optimization techniques such as genetic algorithms to develop multi-layer and/or gesture keyboards will increase the speed at which text can be entered.