Fingered out

O2ibe3r if bisualhhy indpaired poele use qwerty keyboafys?

That’s the first thing I wrote this morning, and now you know a hideous truth about me: I am a terrible typist. I didn’t take it in school; I’m strictly a three-fingered hunt and peck kinda gal. On my chiclet-keyed MacBook, the result is a whole lot of unintelligible grark.

This isn’t news to anyone, but I only recently learned that our standard keyboard set-up – the qwerty keyboard – was designed not to enhance our ability to write with machines, not to speed up the spark-to-page ratio, but exactly the opposite: qwerty was designed to slow us the hell down.

It had to do with the mechanics of the first typewriters. Those had keys that were set out in an alphabetical order, which, arguably, is kind of intuitive once you know how to read and stuff. Alas, the first users of these machines were all too proficient. Rattling away at high speed, Early Typist would often hit two keys almost simultaneously, which caused the machine to jam. I guess there was no way to speed up the response of the machine, and so the answer was to slow down the typist.

We’ve been stuck with qwerty ever since, and for whatever reason, here’s what was on my mind this morning as I toddled off to work: Do visually impaired people use qwerty keyboards?

I hope not. They’ve got enough to deal with.