Re:Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I...
by chillacy on Monday April 20, 2020 @01:57AM
(#22921521)
Supposedly the entire reason Qwerty was designed was to prevent typewriters from jamming by making the keys as disambiguous as possible, which is now ironically ideal on tiny screens.
Re:Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I...
by kqr on Monday April 20, 2020 @10:36AM
(#22924132)
Indeed. All the reasons Qwerty are bad for 10 finger typing are specifically the reasons it's fairly good for tiny touchscreen typing!
Re:Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I...
by lelag on Monday April 20, 2020 @04:03AM
(#22922058)
I switched to Dvorak in the early 2000's and typing qwerty on a keyboard is totally alien to me now.
However, any attempt at using Dvorak on a touch screen keyboard has failed as I can't rely on my muscle memory.
I found that for touch screen input I preferred using qwerty since I have a better feel about where keys are to hunt and peck. Funnily when typing dvorak, my fingers knows where the keys are but I don't have a good conscious mental map of the layout.
Maybe it's due to the fact that you have to touch type dvorak without any visual help since most users use regular qwerty layout keyboards.
Re:Ask HN: I'm a software engineer going blind, how should I...
by james_s_tayler on Monday April 20, 2020 @08:10AM
(#22923148)
Can vouch for colemak being hard to type correctly with on a phone. Normally with qwerty I felt I didn't rely so much on autocorrect, but with Colemak I make certain mistakes quite frequently. Especially given eio are all next to each other a lot of times when I want to type o I type "i" instead. I think it's gotten better in recent months but certain combinations on Colemak just seem to be very sub optimal for a phone. Especially the placing of the vowels.
I'm used to it now and it doesn't quite bother me enough to relearn qwerty on mobile. Kinda stuck in this weird limbo of relying on autocorrect for every 5th word. Hahaha.
Sadly, I'm in a bit too deep to go back to Qwerty on my phone (I'd be very slow for awhile). I do still enjoy Dvorak on the computer and while I don't think I'm a faster typist than I would be with Qwerty, I rarely (pretty much never) experience finger strain when typing for long periods.