Have you ever had your keyboard misconfigured and had to try pressing different keys until you found the one that produces the accent? Have you ever wondered what effect this can have on your performance? Here we outline a theory that might even serve to justify those secret naps we take at work.
Perhaps after typing for a while without looking at the screen, you realize that the “ñ” is actually a semicolon, that the accents are brackets, or that the parenthesis is an asterisk. When using a physical keyboard, the operating system may not interpret exactly what we intend, because the language or perhaps the mapping of the keyboard is misconfigured.
Of course, the importance of the issue also depends on what we are writing. If we are sending a message to a friend, we might not care that the text contains errors. But if we are writing an important document, or our job involves writing, editing, or translating texts, this becomes critical. But it is easy to solve.
Now, even after fixing that, we still have the question of how many keys we need to press to type a text. We know that the keys needed to express ourselves in Spanish are more than for English. Not only because the length of words and sentences is usually on average about 8% longer, but also because in many cases you need to press two keys to write a single character, such as á, é, í, ó, ú, ü. There doesn't seem to be a solution for this.
A quick analysis (on a text from a Spanish translation of 6 million characters) gives us this average occurrence of accents and diereses:
This gives us nearly 3% of symbols that require typing twice to appear on screen. If we add to that, as we said, that Spanish texts are about 8% longer than English ones, we reach the staggering figure of almost 11%. Roughly speaking, that would be equivalent to saying that anything we write in Spanish will take us eleven percent more time than its English counterpart.
If our concern is productivity, these are numbers we might not want to ignore. That is, of course, if we don't also consider the time we lose wondering whether a word carries an accent or not. But that is a topic for another article.
