Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Twice Exceptional DVORAK keyboard

Has anyone else used this? If so, were you able to type faster with DVORAK than with QWERTY?

My son taught himself to type years ago using QWERTY. He is learning DVORAK because it is supposed to be faster and easier to use than QWERTY. He can type more than 60 wpm on QWERTY but would like to type faster.

I haven't ever heard of DVORAK before, but would be very interested in hearing what your ds thinks about it after he's tried it out!

polarbear

I never learned to touch-type in QWERTY. I taught myself Dvorak when I was in grad school, using Mavis Beacon. My DH also types on Dvorak, although he can touch-type QWERTY. In fact, early in our relationship, when we were using UNIX 'talk' to teletype to each other, he correctly deduced that I was a Dvorak typist from watching my errors.

It made a huge difference in my speed, of course, since I wasn't touch-typing before. I think I generally type around 70-80 WPM now. My husband is significantly faster than I am, and I think he saw about a 30-50% increase in speed from Dvorak.

I didn't learn it because of speed, but because of incipient RSI. I figured I should start with the keyboard that was going to put the least strain on my hands. Aside from the fact that the IT guys freak out whenever they have to do something on my computer and the keyboard doesn't work like they expect it to, I have no problems with it - I really like it. And I've never developed a serious RSI problem, even in grad school when I was programming all day a lot of the time.

Being able to do only one keyboard has occasionally been limiting for me, but it's not a huge problem. The biggest difficulty was when I needed a typewriter that could type Dvorak but did not have a memory for my Washington bar exam. I found one on ebay from a university supply room that was being liquidated. (It did have a memory, but it was removable, so I just showed up for the exam without it - no problem.) I would like to be able to touch-type it QWERTY, too, but not enough to put in the time to learn it.

We have started teaching our kids (6 & 10) to type this year and DH really wanted to start them straight onto DVORAK, I may even have asked about it here. But we ended up deciding against it because our kids will both be expected to use school computers a lot in the coming years and until they are almost exclusively using their own laptops they were going to have a hard time. So they are learning QWERTY, but we would like to move them on to DVORAK. Actually I am wondering if we should be moving our 6 yr old onto DVORAK, she's struggling with QWERTY and she's the one with the significant hand issues that is expected to be on full time laptop use as soon as her typing is adequate...

DHs boss is a DVORAK user, he's the only person we know IRL. DH would like to retrain himself but can't find the time at the moment.

I do not touch type--I have some horrible weird hunt and peck method that is sort of fast, but error-ridden. I type about 30 wpm, maybe (when we include fixing errors). Would this work for me?

It might increase your speed and accuracy a little, but Dvorak is really designed for touch-typing. The vowels are all on the home row on the left hand, and the most common consonants are on the home row on the right hand ("aoeuidhtns"), so your fingers travel a lot less when you touch type with it. I think it took me about a month of working on it for 0.5-1.5 hrs/day to be a reliable touch-typist, although I could sort-of type in it after a week. My speed was pretty comparable to yours, also using hunt-and-peck, when I started.

It depends on how much you type and how much time you're willing to devote to it. I was in graduate school doing a lot of programming when I switched, so the investment paid off very fast. You'd have to decide whether it's worth it to you.

Here's a set of stickers you could use so that you can see what you're doing with your regular keyboard. But you might actually be better off without them - I think that the discipline of not having them on my keyboard at all, so I had to remember if I was going to be able to type anything, was very helpful for actually getting it into muscle memory.