Abush1 nrith1 and ybai1/Final Project

For our final project, we've developed a keyboard suite for Uyghur Language across multiple operating systems.

Design

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.

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.

~
`

!
1

 

@
2

#
3

$
4

%
5

^
6

&
7

*
8

)
9

(
0

-
ژ‎‎

_

+
=

       

چ‎

 

ۋ

ﯶ

ر

ت‎

ي

ﯰ

ﯲ

ئو‎

پ‎

»
ڭ‎

}
]

«
ج‎

{
[

\
ف‎

|

        

ھ‎

س

د‎

ئا

ئە‎

ء
ئى

ق‎

ك‎

لا
ل‎

;
گ

:

'
خ‎

"

           

ز‎

ش‎

غ‎

ﯴ‎

ب‎

ن‎

م‎

>
،

<
.

؟
/

For Windows

Since MSKLC has no option for context sensitive input like ibus has, we are unable to input the vowels with a hamza and without a hamza using the same key, the hamza versions are for now just shift + vowel. Everything else is identical as the layout we have on the wiki for the keyboard layout assignment. None of the non-essential keys work, like colons and brackets. No alt-gr needed.

To get this to work you might need to install msklc 1.4 on your computer: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102134. It downloads a file that should be extracted, then there is a setup that can be run.

We have attached the setup: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1jSao7_D5xyspmYA3LvyhEyakxuGmi6AX/view?usp=sharing here. Download, unzip, click the file named setup and run as administrator. If you are on windows 10 or 11, then after the setup the keyboard should show up as English (US) - Uyghur w/ Hamza as shift. This is just a naming bug. If it doesn't show up, restart your computer.