Design and evaluation of Unicode compliance Meitei/Meetei Mayek keyboard layout

Manipuri Language also called as Meiteilon is the only first Tibeto-Burman language that has been recognized by the Indian union and included in the 8th schedule by the 71st amendment of the constitution in 1992. However standards input method for typing Meetei/Meitei Mayek texts do not exist still today. In this paper, the design and development of Meetei/Meitei Mayek keyboard layout is presented that can be used to type Unicode enabled Meetei/Meitei Mayek texts in a standard text editor using any QWERTY keyboard layout. The keyboard is based on Unicode 5.2 standard. We have evaluated the performance of our proposed keyboard layout with the existing Meitei/Meetei Mayek keyboard layout. The evaluation of the proposed Meitei/Meetei Mayek keyboard layout shows a significant improvement in typing speed, ease in learning the keyboard layout and reduction in the error rate.