Needed: an USB socket in computer keyboards

I had a chat with , in which he told me about http://mkweb.bcgsc.ca/carpalx/?perl. This Web page proposes that qwertyists and dvorakists, who program in perl, switch to yet another keyboard layout, which is optimized for this task.

The problem is that if someone, who trained himself to use a customized keyboard layout, needs to temporarily work with another computer, which does not already have his layout – he needs to mentally switch to the standard keyboard layout. Very difficult and highly error-prone.

A solution to the problem would be for people to carry around personalized keyboards. When they need to work on another PC, they plug their keyboard into it and start typing. This calls for standards, and for hardware+software design, which allows keyboards to be plugged and unplugged at any time.

A first step could be for a standard keyboard to provide an USB socket, which allows an user to plug in his own USB keyboard. When a customized keyboard (which, by the way, could be also a chord keyboard for very rapid text entry) is plugged in, the standard keyboard will just pass on the keycodes from the user’s customized keyboard to the PC.

Another problem, which the proposed USB socket in standard keyboards would solve, is that people, who need to use special keyboards due to motor disabilities, are no longer confined to the single PC provided to them at work with suitable keyboard.

Author: Omer Zak

I am deaf since birth. I played with big computers which eat punched cards and spew out printouts since age 12. Ever since they became available, I work and play with desktop size computers which eat keyboard keypresses and spew out display pixels. Among other things, I developed software which helped the deaf in Israel use the telephone network, by means of home computers equipped with modems. Several years later, I developed Hebrew localizations for some cellular phones, which helped the deaf in Israel utilize the cellular phone networks. I am interested in entrepreneurship, Science Fiction and making the world more accessible to people with disabilities.