An optimized single-finger Arabic keyboard layout

Cellular phones and other hand-held devices are now extensively used to write emails, notes and long texts. However, the arrangement of keys in the current keyboards is not optimized to facilitate rapid and ergonomic typing. In this paper, we aim to optimize the Arabic keyboard layout for applications that predominantly use a single pointer. The single-finger keyboard layout problem can be modeled in terms of the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), which can be solved using metaheuristic algorithms. To adapt the problem to the requirements of optimizing the single-finger keyboard, we used three measures in our objective function: the distance between pairs of letters, a weight for each row in the keyboard, and the hit direction of the finger. A Genetic Algorithm (GA) approach with two crossover types (2-point and modified uniform crossovers) and two different mutation operators (swap and insertion) was developed and thoroughly tested. The performance of the Genetic Algorithm was also compared against a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm using the same objective function. Moreover, we developed a Memetic Algorithm combining GA and SA to maximize the chances of obtaining good solutions. We compared our resulting optimized keyboard layouts with different existing and proposed layouts. The comparison results show that our keyboard layouts are more efficient, in terms of the optimization criteria considered, than the tested layouts. Finally, the performance of our keyboards was tested by virtually estimating the speed of typing. Our keyboards also outperform other layouts in terms of the measured typing speed. The details of the algorithms and the experimental results are reported in this paper.