Difference between revisions of "Uyghur/Keyboard"

Revision as of 17:20, 18 February 2025

These are all information about the Uyghur Keyboard.

Existing Resources

- Most devices use the standard unicode keyboard for Uyghur. This is accessible via: * Uyghur Keyboard. As noted before, this is a copyrighted material by Microsoft Corporation. Usage are allowed only for non-commercial use and with copyright notice attached. Terms and Conditions

- Keyman.com provides another keyboard layout: Rachitrali-Uyghur Keyboard. This keyboard is rather basic in its layout and isn't as useful as the standard one. This is under MIT license - permission is allowed.

- On Lexilogos.com, they provide another interesting layout of Uyghur. Some keys are buggy though, which make sense from the fact this website is barely maintained by a person. Copyright is reserved by them. Uyghur Keyboard

- On mobile, there are some different layouts that are available: IOS Keyboard; Gboard; Window 10 Mobile and various third party apps like Infra as an example. All of these are under copyright by their respective company.

Our Layout

Several existing keyboard layouts do reasonably well with documenting Uyghur text, however we made a few modifications to these layouts to hopefully improve typing speed and correct a few small errors caused by the keyboard's derivation from Arabic keyboard resources.

Here is our new Uyghur keyboard layout:

Justification

Existing Uyghur keyboards overlay different Uyghur characters on top of each other, requiring the use of the shift button to access part of the alphabet. Although this system technically works, it makes the affected letters less accessible to users, which is especially significant because two of these letters, خ‎ and ئۆ‎, are quite important, with one of them being a vowel and the other being a commonly used consonant. We moved these letters to new positions on the keyboard, often replacing lesser used symbols such as \ or - with a letter, instead making them accessible via the shift key.

We kept لا in its usual place because it is a compound between two already represented letters, and can be created by typing in the two component letters. Thus, we felt that although there was no need to remove this character from the keyboard, it was unnecessary to move it to a more accessible spot.

Additionally, we moved ء to a new position below ئى. Although ء is barely used at all in Uyghur writing, it often comes in tandem with ئى when it appears, so we thought it made sense to associate these symbols on our new keyboard. Similarly, we addressed the usage of initial vowel characters, binding to two component characters together to prevent the computer from treating vowel characters as two separate letters.

We also moved ڭ to the side to make room for the vowel ئۆ, which we thought belonged spatially nearby the other vowel letters.

We hope that this new keyboard makes typing more accessible for Uyghur speakers.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025 Aiperi Bush, Yuxuan Bai, and Nyvisalsnuk Rith

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.