Recently, I read an article in the WSJ about people complaining that the Dvorak keyboard layout is not supported on most smartphones, whether they use physical keyboards like the Blackberry, or virtual keyboards like the iPhone. There was one quote in particular that caught my eye – “The way he sees it, Dvorak users are like left-handed people and deserve the same kind of respect.” That got me thinking about my experiences as a left-hander and how that makes my interactions with various products just a little bit different.
Being left-handed is more or less finding out that many different products just doesn’t quite work for you as intended. In fact, in many cases products have been designed so that you are caused the most inconvenience possible. I don’t begrudge people who tailor products to cater to right-handers – after all, it’s better to inconvenience just 10% of the population than to inconvenience 90% of the population – but at the same time it’s kind of frustrating.
Most of the time, the difficulty caused by being left-handed is just something silly. I remember the day I noticed that to put change into a vending machine, I basically had to stand all the way off to the right side of the machine in order to get my left hand into the proper location. On the other hand, my right hand would’ve fit perfectly from just about anywhere. Then there’s the teasing in art class because I could never use scissors correctly, and the way that I constantly smear hand-written notes when my hand brushes the paper. But sometimes, the difficulty is much more than that. The most powerful example is a chainsaw, which usually features a guard to protect the operator’s right hand. The lack of a corresponding protection for the left side puts left-handers at a much greater risk of injury or death. Overall, it’s a reminder to me to consider how different people might have different needs, and that sometimes, there is just no one magic solution that will please everyone.
The funny part of this whole thing? My left-handedness means that I actually find QWERTY more useful than Dvorak in a way. If my hands get tired, I sometimes switch to typing with just one hand, and naturally, it’s much easier with my left hand. What I’ve noticed is that most of the important letters are clustered on the left side on QWERTY – to the extent that the New York Times once published a crossword puzzle where all the answers could be formed from letters on the left side of a QWERTY keyboard. This would be impossible with the right hand. On the other hand, the important consonants on Dvorak are clustered on the right side. So maybe Dvorak users aren’t like left-handers after all…