May 5, 2010 by William Peebles
Search engine giant Google announced last week that they will be launching a new on-screen keyboard that will allow users to input characters in a whole range of languages no matter what sort of physical keyboard that they may be using.
Manish Bhargava, Google’s international product manager explained that the keyboard is able to appear from any text field on a webpage as long as the developers adopt a piece of Google code.
We are taking this effort one step further by integrating virtual keyboards into Google search in 35 languages,” he wrote on Google’s blog.
Users of any of the 35 languages supported will see a small icon that looks rather keyboard like appear right next to the search field, clicking on the icon will being up the all new languages keyboard.
Whilst explaining the development Bhargava also said:
“Our user research has shown that many people are more comfortable formulating search queries in their own language but have difficulty typing these queries into Google. To overcome the difficulty they face in typing in their local language scripts, some people have resorted to copying and pasting from other sites and from online translation tools. But the virtual, or “on-screen” keyboard, lets you type directly in your local language script.”
Google seem to have put a lot of thought into making the virtual keyboard easy to use and accessible as users can either click on the keys on-screen or they will match automatically to the keys on the users keyboard.
With touch-screen monitors becoming increasingly popular it is highly likely that the development will become even more user-friendly.
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