Design and evaluation of Bangla keyboard layouts

Bangla is considered as the fifth most frequent spoken language in the world. However, standard input methods for typing Bangla are not very widespread among Bengali users. In this paper we present the design and development of a novel Bangla phonetic keyboard layout that can be used to type Unicode enabled Bangla texts in a standard text editor using any QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard layout is based on Unicode 5.0 standard. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed layout with the existing Bangla keyboard layouts. Our primary evaluation shows a significant improvement in typing speed, and ease of learning and reduction in error rates.