Which keyboard keys are internationally available and easily accessible?

Question

When developing software for public use, it is important to ensure that it is designed with a variety of settings in mind.

How much does a keyboard cost for different layouts? Can all characters rely on existence? Like a backtick:

` 

And can all keys, such as the reverse side, be easily accessible to all users?

I cannot find a resource that provides comprehensive information about this.

Answer 1

I worked on a similar project a few weeks ago, there are some tips that may be useful for you:

• First, make sure that your application will be able to transmit these characters using the UTF-8 encoding to take from Arabic to Russian characters.

• Users are very convenient, so be sure to give them various options, for example:

  • You can simply map keys that are not common to all keyboard layouts, such as ñ á ç , for keyboard shortcuts, such as Shift + n = ñ

  • If your application really uses a physical touch keyboard, take a look at the Swift Key keyboard, an Android application that allows the user to select a layout, the Spanish layout now:

and by scrolling in the language you can select another language of your choice:

note the layout change as ñ no longer exists.

3. Or, maybe even easier for users, make a shortcut so that the panel with all the missing characters from the actual layout of the user's keyboard is displayed so that they can click on them (insert a clicked character at the cursor position).

Answer 2

Other answers cover some of the layout options you might encounter while trying to make your entry only the lowest common denominator. I think you can’t trust what the user can have on the keyboard. The options are so wide. For most programs, you can make assumptions, but this is not 100% coverage.

One thing developers add is the ability to map keys to a function. For example, WSAD or arrow keys to move a game character are common, and the player can select one of these options or any other keys that they want.

Instead of worrying about what they have, try to maintain a wide range of characters and allow the user to dial keys.

Answer 3

There is a way in which it would be easy to analyze all available keyboard layouts, at least on a Linux system, although the same general method could be passed on to other varieties of the operating system.

Downloading / creating a huge source database of accessible keyboard layouts available for different computing devices will require some work and backend memory, but probably not too many of them, since keyboard layout files are relatively small.

After the files are in place, the files with key cards are all very similar, so write a python script (or some other language if you want) to analyze the relevant information and save it in a common database / file groups / regardless of how you prefer to deal with data.

Once the data has been cleared of searching for similarities, groupings, etc., it's just a matter of some math on which computers are really good. There is a whole tag on math.stackexchange.com to work with this type. The standard CPP template library has a Set Template , which can be very useful.

I can write code to extract information from layouts on my Linux development machine, but depending on the target devices, which may not be particularly useful.

It may also be useful to check in the Data Stack Exchange to see if there are any problems that are similar enough that the same methods can be used to analyze the keyboard layout. This seems like a problem that is well suited for this community.

Answer 4

I do not believe that you will find a good article to tell you the most frequently used characters among the different layouts as a percentage. However, there are two ways to look at this and make a very reasonable assumption.

• Historically

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

• Linguistically

From this point of view, most (~ all) keyboards have the most basic and internationally recognized punctuation characters - period . , dash - (underline), coma,, exclamation point ! , all math symbols +-%/ (carefully with a backslash), etc. You can rely on the fact that they will be available for almost any layout (until you come across a Hebrew layout, of course, then you will fall into some amazing characters on top of them).

I don’t know if this was the answer you were looking for, but I hope that it will give you some ideas on which way to choose when choosing special characters to use.

Answer 5

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

Scroll through the keyboards here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout
and see if you can easily find your character on all (or most) of them, and it is on the left side of the key when the key has more than two characters, otherwise AltGr or some other exotic modifier key should be used for the character.

Answer 6

If you are looking for keyboard shortcuts, you should know what the OS will use. This is important, but you need to remember. These two threads will help you with Windows and Linux based OS .

Answer 7

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

Next, \ (backslash) appears as the yen mark on most Japanese keyboards and screens, but still functions as a backslash in tracks, etc.