I have not argued that people who are competent on qwerty actually will switch or need to switch but rather that if they do they will probably recoup their investment in saved time a bit at a time for the rest of their lives . I type about an hour a day now and even five minutes saved every day for a year is a substantial amount of time .I expect to be typing for another twenty years. Young people may be typing for another fifty years.
Now it is not directly relevant to this discussion but it is well known that mastering new skills and knowledge contributes to our mental and physical health as we grow older and this alone is quite possibly sufficient justification for learning Dvorak if one is already middle aged.
As of 2005, Barbara Blackburn, of Salem, Oregon, is the fastest English language typist in the world, according to The Guinness Book of World Records. Using the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard, she has maintained 150 words per minute for 50 min, 170 words per minute for shorter periods and has been clocked at a peak speed of 212 words per minute. Blackburn, who failed her typing class in high school, first encountered the Dvorak keyboard in 1938, quickly learned to achieve very high speeds, and occasionally toured giving speed-typing demonstrations during her secretarial career.[1]
I spent my career doing things with my hands and switched from one dominant technology to another several times. For instance the second to last new tractor I bought had a dedicated lever to shift from forward to reverse which worked much faster than shifting the previous tractor that had a lever that supported six forward speeds as well as reverse. My current tractor has a finger operated electronic shifter and fully automatic transmission and it works even faster saving even more time.
Now I didn’t scrap my older tractor but just about every new top quality tractor has an electrically controlled transmission because five minutes here and five minutes there day after day adds up the real time in a decade.
Personally I do not doubt that qwerty will remain the default go to layout because schools and educators are among the most hidebound of all institutions and professions.
I just want this marvelous and priceless site to revisit this question in light of the fact that Dvorak is now accessible for free to just about anybody.
The name of it after all is STRAIGHT DOPE is it not?
Countless people who might otherwise try Dvorak will fail to do so if they check this site and don’t get the full story. Some of them will suffer adverse health consequence in the form of carpal tunnel and arthritis in their hands to a greater extent than necessary.
Now as to why there aren’t any truly independent studies comparing the two layouts, well, the situation is altogether too much akin to the reasons there have been so few studies of the safety and efficacy of pot as a medicine.
The people in a position to fund such studies are almost all in the camp of those with a vested interest in qwerty and keeping pot out of drugstores because they can’t patent it.Pot is going to cut into the highly lucrative sale of any number of patented drugs.
The people in the Dvorak camp have no opportunity to benefit from funding such a study and setting one up that is up to snuff would cost an arm and a leg because it would take a long time for it to generate objective results rather than just a misleading conclusion to the effect that the test subjects don’t always pick up enough speed and accuracy to justify retraining.
This may actually be a true and honest conclusion but it is not the answer to the question of which layout is inherently the superior on.
A fair test would involve training novice typists from scratch on both keyboards by teachers equally well trained in comparable classrooms with the provision that the teachers teaching the Dvorak keyboard must be personally highly proficient on Dvorak.
Otherwise teachers with a lifetime investment in qwerty will inevitably teach qwerty more enthusiastically than Dvorak and their students will pick up on their prejudice and follow up on it themselves to a substantial extent.
Kids that have been hunting and pecking and self training on qwerty will have a headstart on kids who have never used computers at all faced with learning Dvorak although this would fade way over the span of a school year in my personal estimation.
I know about such bias in the classroom having once been a professionally trained and licensed teacher myself.
I’m an old fxrt in many respects but I am willing to admit that the old ways are not always the best ways.
Most people with a vested interest in an old skill or a little face at stake aren’t willing to consider the possibility that a new technology is a better technology and worth the trouble of adapting to it.
Dvorak is now virtually universally available in a couple of seconds via a keyboard short cut at zero cost and making the transition can be a personal affair and does not require retraining any body at all .
