The Dvorak keyboard instead forces you to alternate hands frequently. It does so by placing all vowels plus Y in the left hand, but the 13 most common consonants in the right. As a result, not a single word or even a single syllable can be typed with the right hand alone (no, grr isn’t a word), and only a few words can be typed with the left hand alone.
QWERTY’s many words and letter strings for the left hand are especially unfortunate when you consider that most people are right-handed. Yet QWERTY allocates to the weaker left hand the most common English letter (E), the second most common (T), and the fourth most common (A), thus making the left hand perform more than half of all typing strokes (56 percent). We are condemned to struggle with a left-handed typewriter in a right-handed world. The Dvorak keyboard instead gives 56 percent of all strokes to the right hand.
QWERTY’s overuse of our weaker hand extends to our weaker fingers. On each hand, the pinkie (fifth finger) is the weakest, and finger strength increases from the fifth to the second finger (index finger). Yet QWERTY makes almost as much use of our weakest finger (left fifth) as of our second strongest (right third). In contrast, the rank sequence of finger use on the Dvorak keyboard is identical to the rank sequence of finger strength, and the typing load on each finger is proportional to its strength.
The QWERTY keyboard also condemns us to awkward finger sequences. As we already know, strokes that alternate between hands are faster than successive strokes of the same hand. But if you must type two successive strokes with the same hand, it’s fastest to do so with two remote fingers (such as at, left fifth to second finger), next fastest with two adjacent fingers (as, left fifth to fourth finger), slower with the same finger on the same row (ee, left third finger), and slowest of all with the same finger on different rows (ed, left third finger). Yet with the QWERTY keyboard, 20 percent of all English digraphs are typed by adjacent fingers, and more than 4 percent (such as the common ed) by the same finger; corresponding numbers for the Dvorak keyboard are only 2 percent and 1 percent, respectively.
The result of all these shortcomings is that typing on a QWERTY keyboard is unnecessarily tiring, slow, inaccurate, hard to learn, and hard to remember. In a normal workday a good typist’s fingers cover up to 20 miles on a QWERTY keyboard, but only one mile on a Dvorak keyboard. QWERTY typists achieve barely half the speed of Dvorak typists, who hold most world records for typing speed. QWERTY typists make about twice the errors that Dvorak typists make. For a beginner to reach a speed of 40 words per minute, the person would need 56 hours of training on a QWERTY keyboard (an average of four hours per day during my two weeks of chicken pox) but only 18 hours on a Dvorak keyboard.
How, then, did the QWERTY keyboard arise? Why was it adopted, despite all its failings? And why in the world have we continued to stick with it?
