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Notes -
I realize that I may be outside of the context window of the Motte on this post. I thought folks here would be more familiar with keyboard/mouse history, I was wrong.
Here's a decent writeup of how QWERTY is essentially an anachronistic mistake.
Familiarity with the topic doesn't make it more relevant to your thesis. Dvorak is exactly as arbitrary and hard to learn as Qwerty. The relative efficiency of touch-typing english text matters when you're already doing 100+ wpm and type regularly as part of your job or something. Most people don't touch type, a different layout wouldn't help them any.
Of course, I don't think your thesis has any basis in reality anyway. The average person these days is quite proficient with phone onscreen keyboards, which are vastly worse interfaces than physical keyboards.
And, as with dictation, if you want to do your text input with eyetracking, you've been able to do that on existing computers for years. People keep using keyboards because they are in fact quite good at what they do.
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