Implementation of Unicode Complaint Odia Keyboard and Its Evaluation Using Cognitive Model

Odia is the principal regional language of Odisha and the sixth classical language of India. There are more than 33 million people of Odisha speak Odia in their day to day life. However, standard input methods for typing Odia are not very widespread among Odia users. In this paper we present the design and development of a novel Odia keyboard layout that can be used to type Unicode enabled Odia 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 Odia keyboard layouts. We have done this evaluation using cognitive model. Our primary evaluation shows a significant improvement in reducing time irrespective of keystroke, increasing typing speed, reducing error rates as well as easing of learning. We have designed a typing s/w (Baishakhi key logger) for all Odias to learn Odia typing.