The MEOW keyboard!

[devycarol]

Meoooooooow!

I've been Dvorak user on desktop for a long while. The main reason is comfort—less finger curling and such. Unfortunately Dvorak is desgined for two hands, so it's not great for the mobile use case. This is a shame! I think that mobile is a great platform to play with alt layouts since you don't have to worry about keyboard shortcuts or mismatched keycaps :).

About a year ago, I found myself tired of moving my thumb all over the place to type on the mobile QWERTY. So! I forked OpenBoard and made a custom layout optimized for right-handed gesture typing in English. It does this by placing all the common letters on the right side of the screen.

Yesterday, I discovered this project! I was pleased to see how easy it is to configure new layouts compared to the old app. I made a few final changes to my layout and realized it says MEOW in the middle row now, so it's now the MEOW keyboard.

(You can see from my toolbars that I'm a customization freak in a lot of ways 🙃)

You're welcome to try this layout out for yourself! Here's the layout file: meow.txt. I'd really appreciate any feedback if you decide to use it, I'm really passionate about accessibility software!

One of the most challenging things has been keeping those common letters close together on the right size while still maintaining gesture clarity. There's actually a really interesting video about this tradeoff here. I think their research was interesting, but they neglected to consider thumb distances. I've just gone with a heuristic approach when designing this keyboard: what are the most common words? how do I make those gestures as comfortable as possible? etc.

Presumably you could have a left-handed version by inverting it—here's a mockup weom.txt. There are some considerations though: 'I' is strategically placed on MEOW to be easily capitalized via shift-key drag. It's further away when you invert it. Perhaps left-handed folks would want to swap the shift and backspace keys? I'm not a handedness expert by any means.

I'd be more than happy to see this upstreamed, though another thing to be mindful of is that this keyboard was designed and tested by MY hands ;). I'd love to hear feedback from anybody who test-drives this layout to hear how it feels in your hands, before I consider this project to be "final."

Thanks for reading!