Chorded Keyboard - Commercial Devices

Commercial Devices

One minimal chordic keyboard example is Edgar Matias' Half-Qwerty keyboard described in patent US 5288158 circa 1992 that produces the letters of the missing half when the user simultaneously presses the space bar along with the mirror key. INTERCHI '93 published a study by Matias, MacKenzie and Buxton showing that people who have already learned to touch-type can quickly recover 50 to 70% of their two-handed typing speed. The loss contributes to the speed discussion above. It is implemented on two popular mobile phones, each provided with software disambiguation, which allows users to avoid using the space-bar.

"Multiambic" keyers for use with wearable computers were invented in Canada in the 1970s. Multiambic keyers are similar to chording keyboards but without the board, in that the keys are grouped in a cluster for being handheld, rather than for sitting on a flat surface.

Chording keyboards are also used as portable but two handed input devices for the visually impaired (either combined with a refreshable braille display or vocal synthesis). Such keyboards use a minimum of seven keys, where each key corresponds to an individual braille point, except one key which is used as a spacebar. In some applications, the spacebar is used to produce additional chords which enable the user to issue editing commands, such as moving the cursor, or deleting words. Note that the number of points used in braille computing is not 6, but 8, as this allows the user, among other things, to distinguish between small and capital letters, as well as identify the position of the cursor. As a result, most newer chorded keyboards for braille input include at least nine keys.

Touch screen chordic keyboards are available to smartphone users as an optional way of entering text. As the number of keys is low the button areas can be made bigger and easier to hit on the small screen. The most common letters do not necessarily require chording as is the case with the GKOS keyboard optimised layouts (Android app) where the twelve most frequent characters only require single keys.