Individuals working independently, and/or supported by their employers from industry/ government/ academia/ non-governmental organizations, with interest in Indic (Indian) languages and  their computing needs, are invited to participate in this new working group.  The objective of the working group is to deliberate the virtual keyboard technologies and issues for modern phones/tablet computing device, with touch screen interface, and compose and shape the standard. 

This standard will contain a conceptual model applicable to all Indian languages with appropriate customization for each language.

Need for the Standard: A large majority of Indians are not comfortable using computing devices with an English keyboard interface. INSCRIPT layout was standardized by the Indian government in 1986 for QWERTY physical keyboards, with the aim of interoperability and touch typing for all Indian languages.  Due to limitations in accommodating the preferences of languages other than Hindi, the high learning curve because of lack of phonetic mapping between English and Indian language characters, and the lack of availability of physical keyboards with Indian language characters, alternate layouts, and transliteration based input methods as per the preferences of vendors and users proliferated.

Phones/Tablets with touch user interface can display characters on keyboard dynamically for each language. This can help people easily use their phones for data needs in their native language.  INSCRIPT cannot be adopted easily for the following reasons: it uses the top row (the row above QWERTY) of the conventional keyboard and punctuation keys for Hindi alphabet. With the smaller screen size and resolution on mobile phones, the virtual keyboards are limited to only four rows, covering the basic English alphabet needs.  Therefore INSCRIPT is not usable readily even for Hindi. The proposed standard will help in taking the benefits of computing and communication technologies to everyone.

Sign up for membership in the working group (prior to the group’s inaugural meeting, which is tentatively set for January 25, 2012) by visiting the working group wiki page and following the instructions. Information for attending the first meeting will be sent to all the registered people prior to the meeting.

For any further clarifications, please contact Arjuna Rao Chavala, IEEE P1908.1 Working Group Chair, at arjunaraoc@ieee.org.

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