Dear readers,
For a while now I have been thinking how we can make life easier for those who use our products in West Africa with either qwerty or azerty keyboards. In the multi-lingual context of West-Africa it is often needed to switch between typing a regional language like Wolof, Bambara, Jula, Fulani and French for instance. Luckily, the keyboards developed for the West African languages make that possible. But do they really?
For instance, the SIL Mali keyboard can produce an é by typing e and /. In MS Word however, a French word with any kind of accented vowel produced by keyman this way is not recognised. To type French correctly with a qwerty keyboard and it to be recognised by the MS Word spell check, one has to use the EuroLatin (SIL) keyboard. (i.e. This also applies for the Cameroun keyboard, and probably others.)
However, the difficulty with the Eurolatin keyboard is that the typing sequence is counter- intuitive (i.e. the other way around). One first types the special character, followed by the vowel. In this case ’ followed by e -› to get é. The advantage is that the word élève (on the right in the image) is recognised by MS Word, and no further spell check is needed. The disadvantage is that the typing is counter intuitive for a user working with the Mali Keyboard, (or most West African keyboards) and thus it is difficult to learn.
So my question is, how could the (West-)African keyboards be improved so that the French accents are seen as valid by spell checkers like MS Word?
5 posts - 4 participants