This is what I was thinking…  hear me out.

Imagine you could make the keyboard so efficient that you didn’t need to move your hands? It could be very ergonomic if it had the same number of keys as you have fingers since that the design could mirror your natural handprint. With everything under your fingers there is no slipping onto the wrong keys and no looking since your fingers cover the keys. This could make keyboard input available is lots of new places like the handlebars of a bike, steering wheel, a pair of gloves or a game controller. All you would need is a logical system to remember where things are or so you could figure out where the keystrokes are made.

 I was considering this one day when I realized how the twenty-six letter alphabet fits perfectly with ten fingers. Simply use a single press or a thumb shift. 10 + 8 + 8 = 26. Pressing both thumbs shifts the next letter to upper case.  I thought the design should be alphabetic since learning something completely different would be challenging enough.  Customization could come later for best efficiency by folks who embrace the concept.

Ask someone to press a button and most will use the right index finger, so start the alphabet there.  This arrangement puts all vowels on both index and ring fingers and the right thumb.

Next are the keystrokes also needed for letter writing so those start with the right index finger as the shift key.  Space, enter, period, question mark, tab, comma and apostrophe. The left index shifts for back space, tilde, colon, semicolon, asterisk, quote, @.  The keys used for the letters help determine the keystrokes like “T” for Tab, “C” for comma, the keys for P & U for Page up and P & D for Page down.  So much of it worked out so perfectly, it was like it was intended.

Originally, I built it sequentially so the keystroke would be determined by the order of the key pressed, making the chords very simple with only two or three keys.  After experimenting, I decided to make it so the order didn’t matter since typing at speed would cause fewer errors.  I made numerous prototypes and hired engineers to build my vision. My first wireless DecaTxt keyboard won an international R&D 100 Award, beating entries from MIT, NASA, Dow Chemicals, Hitachi and others! This has been a solo journey built on a shoe string with only a small raise on Indigogo. I built 200 of the latest version 3 and had to solder and hand customize the cases. They are among of the most unique keyboards ever publicly available.

Many years ago I had a basic program built that uses a normal keyboard to type with just 10 keys. It only works in a small window but provides a taste of the system that we tested at a local college with a half dozen students. If anyone it interested in trying it, you will likely need additional programs from Microsoft to run it on a modern OS. It is 8K zipped & 32K extracted so quite small and I have made it available through my Hightail Space at [https://spaces.hightail.com/space/a8UqbgYzHJ](https://spaces.hightail.com/space/a8UqbgYzHJ)  for anyone to download.

I look forward to hearing some reasonable perspectives from the expert users here and welcome your questions. You can also see more at in10did dot com.

 

Humanizing keyboard input