Towards an Efficient Urdu Keyboard Layout

Abstract

English is the most common language for conveying digital information in the world. However, there is a huge population of world that doesn’t understand English and hence there is a need of translating the digital information to other languages as well. Translation of Information Communication Technologies (ICTs’) to local languages has been a focus of the research for quite a while now. Keyboard has been one of the main sources of input in ICTs’ and like translation of information; there is a need of Keyboard localization (efficient customization of keyboard for other languages). This paper presents efficient keyboard localization of Urdu language. This paper proposes four techniques adopted from Dvorak to analyze Urdu words based on alphabet frequencies to design an efficient Urdu keyboard layout. These techniques are frequency words, Letter Frequencies, Diagraphs frequencies and reverse diagraph frequencies. Five thousand most frequently used words of Urdu were analyzed by these four techniques and it was concluded that layouts resulting from this analyses would be different from the most commonly used Urdu phonetic keyboard. Therefore there is need to consider these layouts as well to design an efficient keyboard layout for Urdu users.