Hello, am 2016-05-08 um 20:11 Uhr schrieb Don Osborn:
Another thing about user needs is that the polyglot/pluriliterate user may prefer something that reflects that, as opposed to having multiple keyboards for languages whose character repertoires are much the same. From a national or regional (sub-continental) point of view I would think a one-size fits all/many standard or set of keyboard standards would be ideal. But no one seems to be going there yet, after all these years.
Yes, there is somebody going there. E. g., the German standard DIN 2137:2012-06 defines a “T2” layout which is meant for all official, Latin-based orthographies worldwide, and additionally for the Latin-based minority languages of Germany and Austria. The layout is based on the traditional QWERTZU layout for German and Austrian keyboards (which is now dubbed “T1”). Cf. <https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/T2_(Tastaturbelegung)>. There is also a “T3” layout defined which comprises all characters mentioned in ISO/IEC 9995-3:2010. You can even buy a hardware T2 keyboard; however I have not tried it, because I have defined my own keyboard layout suite (pan-European Latin, pan-European Cyrillic, monotonic Greek, and Yiddish) for personal use, long ago. Best wishes, Otto Stolz