Science and Information Conference 2014
August 27-29, 2014 | London, UK
An Optimized Single-Finger Arabic Keyboard
Layout
Manar I. Hosny∗ , Nourah Alswaidan† , and Abir Benabid Najjar‡
College of Computer and Information Sciences
King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
Email: ∗ mifawzi@ksu.edu.sa, † nourah swaidan@yahoo.com, ‡ abbenabid@ksu.edu.sa
Abstract—Cellular phones and other hand-held devices are
now extensively used to write emails, notes and long texts.
However, the arrangement of keys in the current keyboards
is not optimized to facilitate rapid and ergonomic typing. In
this paper, we aim to optimize the Arabic keyboard layout
for applications that predominantly use a single pointer. The
single-finger keyboard layout problem can be modeled in terms
of the Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), which can be
solved using metaheuristic algorithms. To adapt the problem
to the requirements of optimizing the single-finger keyboard,
we used three measures in our objective function: the distance
between pairs of letters, a weight for each row in the keyboard,
and the hit direction of the finger. A Genetic Algorithm (GA)
approach with two crossover types (2-point and modified uniform
crossovers) and two different mutation operators (swap and
insertion) was developed and thoroughly tested. The performance
of the Genetic Algorithm was also compared against a Simulated
Annealing (SA) algorithm using the same objective function.
Moreover, we developed a Memetic Algorithm combining GA
and SA to maximize the chances of obtaining good solutions.
We compared our resulting optimized keyboard layouts with
different existing and proposed layouts. The comparison results
show that our keyboard layouts are more efficient, in terms
of the optimization criteria considered, than the tested layouts.
Finally, the performance of our keyboards was tested by virtually
estimating the speed of typing. Our keyboards also outperform
other layouts in terms of the measured typing speed. The details
of the algorithms and the experimental results are reported in
this paper.
Keywords—Keyboard Design; Combinatorial Optimization;
Metaheuristics; Genetic Algorithms; Quadratic Assignment Prob-
lem
I. I NTRODUCTION
Nowadays, there is a widespread use of wireless and hand-
held devices such as cellphones, smart phones, Portable Data
Assistant (PDA), tablets, and many others. These devices en-
able sending emails and include applications that allow writing
long text. When holding a mobile device, only one hand or one
pointer is available for data input. Therefore, optimizing the
keyboard layout for such use is essential. Moreover, for people
with significant motor disabilities, typing a text using both
hands may be a very difficult task. For example, a person who
cannot use his hands may use a mouth stick to type. Typing
with a stick mimics typing with a single finger. Despite the
advancement in hand-held devices, the present day keyboards
are not optimal for the aforementioned applications, in terms
of enhancing the writing speed and increasing the accuracy
and comfort of typing.
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This research aims to optimize a single-finger (s-finger)
keyboard layout for the Arabic language. Optimizing the layout
for the s-finger keyboard, in terms of key arrangement, is
essential to improve the typing speed as well as the comfort
of the user and accuracy of the text.
Designing a keyboard for people using mobile devices or
for users with special needs is a challenging task, and the
research in such domain is relatively scarce, especially in
non-Latin languages. To the best of our knowledge, there is
only one previous attempt to optimize the s-finger keyboard
layout for the Arabic language in an early version of this
research [1]. Also, the results of research done on optimizing
the many-finger (m-finger) keyboard layout cannot be used
for applications intended for an s-finger. To increase the typing
speed, the m-finger keyboard places the frequent pairs of letters
at a distance from each other; hence when the first letter is
being typed another finger is ready to type the next letter [2].
Contrary to that, frequently occurring pairs of letters in the
s-finger keyboard must be placed close to each other, to make
it easier for a finger to move from one letter to another.
The Arabic language is unlike other languages, because the
number of letters is different and the text is written from right
to left, which affects the placement of letters on the keyboard.
To optimize the s-finger Arabic keyboard layout, we have to
take into consideration that hand-held devices are typically
small in size, and hence the keyboard grid will be small as
well. Therefore, not all characters can be assigned to different
keys. Some characters will have to share the same location and
accessed through a shift key. The placement of letters on the
keyboard must take into account the frequency of appearance
of single letters, and of pairs of letters as well. In addition,
the movement direction of the finger from right to left must
be considered in the layout design.
The s-finger keyboard layout problem can be modeled in
terms of the famous Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP) [3].
The QAP is a well-known combinatorial optimization problem.
It was proposed in 1957 by Koopmans and Beckmann [4]. The
problem involves assigning n facilities to n locations. Two
measures are used in the objective function: the first measure is
the flow cij between the facilities i and j. The second measure
is the distance dkl between location k and location l. When a
facility i is assigned to location p(i), and facility j is assigned
to location p(j), the cost of this assignment is calculated as
cij ×dp(i)p(j) . Then the total cost of assignment of all facilities
will be the sum of each assignment over all i and j. The
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objective function of the QAP is defined as follows:
∑
n ∑
n hand alteration, consecutive usage of the same finger, avoid
cost = min cij × dp(i)p(j) (1)
i=1 j=1
The QAP is known to be NP-hard [4]. Therefore, meta-
heuristic algorithms can be used to solve such problem. In the
current research, we compare two metaheuristic algorithms:
Simulated Annealing (SA) and Genetic Algorithms (GAs) for
solving the single finger Arabic keyboard optimization prob-
lem. As mentioned before, an early version of our SA approach
was published in [1], while to the best of our knowledge,
this is the first attempt to use a GA for optimizing the single
finger Arabic keyboard. In this paper, we enhance the previous
SA attempt by improving the objective function. In our new
objective function, we take into account the convenience of
typing (in terms of placement of letters on different rows
of the keyboard), and the movement direction of the finger
from right to left (called the “hit direction”). In addition, the
frequencies of pairs of letters and their separating distances on
the keyboard is taken into consideration.
We implemented a genetic algorithm with two simple mu-
tations, which are: swap and insertion. Moreover, the genetic
algorithm is hybridized with simulated annealing, hoping to
maximize its chances of obtaining good solutions. Since the
optimization will be based on movement time and character
transition frequency, we need to calculate the frequency of
occurrence of each Arabic letter and for pairs of letters as
well. Arabic articles from Wikipedia were used to calculate
this information.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows: Section II
is a review of previous work on keyboard layout optimization,
and the solution methods for different languages. In Section
III, we will present our proposed approaches for solving this
problem. Then, in Section IV, the experimental results will be
reported, and finally Section V concludes with a brief summary
and intended future work.
II. R ELATED W ORK
A. Multiple-Finger (M-Finger) Keyboards
1) Latin Keyboards: Light and Anderson [5], designed an
optimized m-finger English keyboard layout using simulated
annealing. Their objective function used the frequency of pairs
of characters and the time needed to travel to each letter. The
results showed that the layouts produced by this algorithm is
better and faster in comparison to the well known QWERTY
keyboard and Dvorak’s typewriters. Also, they noticed that the
algorithm always manages to place the most common letters
where they belong, in order to be typed using the index or
the middle fingers, which are considered to be the strongest
of all fingers. In addition, it places the least used letters at the
bottom row.
Eggers et al. [6], applied an Ant Colony Algorithm (ACO)
to optimize French, German and English keyboard layouts.
In their design they aimed to achieve higher typing speed
without causing fatigue or typing errors, and to allow the use of
touch typing. To achieve such goals, they defined an objective
function that tests for six criteria, which are: accessibility and
load distribution of typing load with regard to the strength
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Science and Information Conference 2014
August 27-29, 2014 | London, UK
of the fingers, the number of keys it takes to type a text,
big steps when using the same hand, and when typing two
consecutive characters using one hand the movement direction
of the fingers must be from the little finger to the thump.
2) Arabic Keyboards: Malas et al. [2] applied a GA to
design an m-finger Arabic keyboard layout that optimizes the
typing speed. The characters were divided into two groups
based on their frequency. The first group contains the char-
acters with the highest frequencies, which will be placed on
the main grid. The second group contains the characters with
the lowest frequencies, which will be accessed through a shift
key. The arrangement of characters on the main grid will be
determined based on the frequency of the pair of characters
and the pair typing time. They have considered the following
attributes: hand transition, row transition, finger transition, row
weight and finger weight. The “shift” set was not optimized
but assigned manually, by placing the characters in similar
locations to their placement in the common layout. Their
layout design, shown in Fig. 5(b), solves some of the common
Arabic keyboard problems, such as: placing the letter ( X ) in
 the combination of the
an awkward position, and it eliminated
not very frequent character pair ( B). Furthermore, this design
increased the typing speed by 35%.
Khorshid et al. [7], designed an optimized Arabic keyboard
layout using a GA. They started by calculating the frequency
of each character and pairs of characters, based on the Qur’an
holy text. The criteria they tested in their objective function are
the same ones used in Eggers et al. [6]. Their design,shown
in Fig. 5(a), demonstrated a better performance in comparison
with the currently used keyboard; it improved the typing speed
by 36.3%.
B. Single-Finger (S-Finger) Keyboards
Li et al. [3] tried to optimize the movement time of key
transition. They used Fitts’ law [8] to calculate the movement
time. Fitts’ law, shown in (2), is a successful and well-studied
model for the prediction of human movement time required to
move to a target area.
The next step was to calculate pairs of characters’ frequent
appearance. 15,000 of the most common words from the
British National Corpus were used. They tackled this problem
using two models: an IP model, where the transition is fixed
between any two keys, and a two stage heuristic. In the second
model, the first stage performs an exact search, using a swap
neighborhood move to obtain a new solution. The next stage
is applying simulated annealing. This algorithm reaches a
solution in less than one minute. They noticed that the vowels
are placed close to each other, while their frequencies when
they are paired are not high; however, each vowel on its own
has a high frequency.
Dell’Amico et al. [9] designed an optimized single-finger
keyboard layout for different languages: English, French,
Italian and Spanish. The goal is to allocate the characters
to the keys, where the average time it takes to write a
text is the minimal. They also used Fitts’ law to calculate
average time. They solved this problem using the following
metaheuristics: local search, simulated annealing, tabu search,
variable neighborhood search, and Fast Ant System.
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III. P ROPOSED A PPROACH
As can be seen from the literature review above, there
is no previous published research on optimizing the s-finger
Arabic keyboard. The first attempt was in our previous work
[1], where an SA algorithm was developed to optimize the
Arabic keyboard design for single-pointer applications. The
design aimed to maximize the typing speed by minimizing
the distance between the most frequent pairs of Arabic letters.
The transition frequency calculated by Malas et al. [2] was
used for this purpose, and the Euclidean distances measure
was used to calculate the distance dij between each pair of
keys. As for the movement time it was measured using Fitts’
law [8]. More specifically, according to Fitts’ law, the time and
difficulty required to type consecutively two symbols i and j,
can be estimated by:
Tij = α + β · log2 (
dij
+ 1) (2)
Wj
The parameters α and β are constants, dij is the distance of
the two keys assigned to i and j, and Wj is the width of the
target key assigned to j. The constant α may be omitted since
its contribution to the overall typing time is independent from
the keys’ arrangement. For the constant value β, we set it to
1
4.9 bits/sec which is the value that has been experimentally
determined by MacKenzie et al. [10] in the special case of
using a stylus for data entry. Moreover, we assume that the
keys have equal widths, which implies that Wj = 1, and then
the movement time only depends on the distance of the two
keys and then can be estimated by:
{
4.9 · log2 (dij + 1), if i ̸= j
1
Tij = (3)
0.127 sec, if i = j
In order to improve the speed of typing and maintain the
direction of Arabic writing from right to left, the distance
between the pairs will be lower when the pointer moves from
right to left than when it moves from left to right. The 32 most
frequent letters were placed on a 3 × 11 grid. The objective
function used was as follows:
1 ∑∑ 1 ∑∑
N N N N
S= fij Tij = fij · log2 (dij + 1) (4)
4.9 i=1 j=1 4.9 i=1 j=1
Where fij is the frequency between a pair of letters, and
Dij is the distance between them. The initial SA temperature
Tmax was set to 107 and the same temperature was used in
15 iterations. The resulting keyboard is shown in Fig. 5(d).
The resulting layout is better by 20% in comparison with the
keyboard layouts used in mobile devices. Moreover, it is better
by 33% in comparison with the keyboard layouts produced by
Malas et al. in [2].
To further enhance our research in [1], the current research
was divided into two stages:
(1) Collect Arabic text and calculate the frequency of each
Arabic letter and for each pair of letters, and
(2) The optimization stage which is intended to find the best
allocation of letters in the grid for the s-finger Arabic keyboard
layout.
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A. Collect Arabic Text & Calculate the Frequencies
To make sure that the calculated letter frequencies are
measured correctly, the data (Arabic text) must be chosen
carefully. The data must be reliable and not inclined to any
particular filed or subject. We used Arabic Wikipedia as a
source for calculating the letters frequencies. The articles are
available to download from Wikimedia dump service [11]. The
articles were downloaded in a single XML file that contains
other meta information. Therefore, it was necessary to extract
the Arabic text and prepare it for the calculation of the
Arabic letters frequencies. NetBeans IDE 7.3 and the Regular
Expression library in Java were used in this step. A total of
11,000 articles have been processed, and then the frequency
of each Arabic letter and the frequency of each pair of letters
were calculated. Fig. 1 shows the frequency of Arabic letters
obtained in this phase. As can be seen from the figure, the pair
( È@ ) (meaning “the” in English) has the highest frequency in
the Arabic language.
Fig. 1. Frequency of Letter Pairs in Arabic
B. The Optimization Phase
In this phase a GA approach to solve the keyboard layout
optimization problem is proposed. Genetic algorithms have
been successfully used in solving the QAP. In addition, a
GA was applied to solve the m-finger Persian keyboard in
[12], the m-finger Hindi keyboard in [13], and the m-finger
Arabic keyboard in [2] [7]. As far as we know, it has not been
previously used in the optimization of s-finger keyboards in
any language. In the proposed approach, we try to utilize the
success of GAs in solving similar optimization problems for
solving the s-finger keyboard layout optimization. The steps
of the classical GA framework are followed in our algorithm.
However, two crossover methods are used along with a local
search metaheuristic for the mutation operator. Using a local
search metaheuristic as a mutation operator can be seen as a
“fast track” optimization for some selected individuals, which
can help improve the quality of population and speedup the
optimization process. The following subsections describe the
different components of the GA approach.
1) Solution Representation: A permutation encoding is
used to represent the Arabic letters, such that each letter will
be encoded using an integer value. Since we have 36 letters,
we will use the numbers from 1-36 to represent these letters
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in a 2-D grid. However, the grid size is limited to cellphones
sizes. The recently developed cellphones place the letters in
3 × 10 or 3 × 11 grid. Here we use 3 × 11. So the number of
letters that the grid can hold is 33; hence three letters will not
be included in the grid and will be accessed through a shift
key.
2) The Objective Function: The problem is modeled based
on the QAP, where the objective of a solution is determined by
the flow between the “facilities” (letters in our case) and the
distance between them. Our objective function is determined
based on the frequency of occurrence of single letters, the
frequency of occurrence of pairs of letters together, and by the
distance between the letters. The Euclidean distance is used to
measure the distance dij between two keys i, j.
To minimize the distance between the most frequent pairs
of letters, the distance between the letters is multiplied by the
frequency of the pair, as shown in Equation (5):
Dij = fij dij (5)
Hence, pairs of letters that occur frequently together should
be placed next to each other. Therefore, the frequency of pairs
of letters is used to allocate the pairs to adjacent keys.
Unlike other languages, the text in the Arabic language is
written from right to left, and this must be considered when
placing the letters in the grid. For example: the most frequent
letter pair in the Arabic language is ( È@), so when placing the
letter ( @ ) in the grid it should be on the right of the letter ( È
) (this will be called the “hit direction”). To deal with the hit
direction, a penalty, proportional to the frequency of the pair
of letters, is added when the pointer moves from left to right
regardless of the row or the column. This part of the objective
function is formulated as shown in Equation (6).
{ they appear in the second parent, starting after the
0, if xi − xj > 0
Sij = fij vij , where vij = (6)
1, otherwise
Finally, the frequency of each letter will determine the row
to which it will be assigned. The most frequent letters should
be placed in the middle row, since this is more convenient for
the user, while the less frequent ones should be placed in the
upper or bottom rows. As recommended in [2], each row will
have a weight which will be 1, 2 or 3 for the middle, upper,
and bottom rows respectively. If the frequency of occurrence
of a letter i is fi and wi is the row weight of the row assigned
to letter i, this part of the objective function is represented as
shown in Equation (7):
{ ulated Annealing (SA) metaheuristic. The resulting algorithm
yi , if yi = 3
Ri = fi wi , where wi = (7)
(3 − yi ), otherwise
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In other words, Equation (7) indicates that a penalty is
added to assigning high frequency letters to the upper and
bottom rows, with more penalty for the bottom row than the
upper, since the upper row is slightly more convenient in typing
than the bottom row.
We can then combine all three objectives to get the overall
score (objective) of the solution, which would be:
n ∑
∑ n ∑
n ∑
n ∑
n
F = min a Dij + b Sij + c Ri (8)
i=1 j=1 i=1 j=1 i=1
Where a, b and c are weights that determine the importance
of each term.
3) The Crossover Operators: Two crossover methods are
proposed:
1) Modified Uniform Crossover (MUX): This
crossover is adopted from the regular uniform
crossover [14], but it is modified to apply to a 2-D
grid instead of one dimensional permutation (see
Fig. 2 for illustration). In this crossover, two parents
produce two children. Starting from the first location
on the top left, the alleles will be chosen at random
from one of the parents, following a randomly
generated mask pattern of 0’s and 1’s. When the
mask value is 1, the allele in child 1 will be taken
from parent 1, while the allele in child 2 will be
taken from parent 2. The opposite happens when the
mask value is 0. If the chosen allele has been already
inherited previously, the allele from the other parent
will be taken instead. If the alleles in both parents
are already inherited, then the operator will leave the
location empty and move on to the next location. At
the end, the letters that have not been assigned yet
will be randomly distributed to the empty locations.
2) Two Point Crossover (TPX):In this type of
crossover, two cutoff points are randomly selected.
Then the outer parts of the cutoff points will be
inherited by the offspring from one parent, and the
rest of the letters will be taken in the same order as
first cutoff point location and moving up row by row,
as shown in the example in Fig. 3.
4) The Mutation Operators: Two mutation operators are
considered:
1) Swap Mutation: Two locations are selected ran-
domly and their letters will be exchanged.
2) Insertion Mutation: A letter is selected at random
and inserted into another location in the same row.
The remaining letters will be shifted to fill in the gap
of the removed letter and make room for the newly
inserted letter.
Moreover, we implemented an extension of the traditional
genetic algorithm by replacing the mutation operator by a Sim-
is can be called a Memetic Algorithm that performs local
improvement on the child using classical Simulated Annealing.
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• The cooling rate α = 0.95

A. Objective Function Weights

As mentioned before, there are three measures that are used

to evaluate the objective of a solution: (1) the distance between
each pair of letters and the frequency between them, (2) the
row weight, and (3) The hit direction.

To determine the impact of each measure, it will be

multiplied by a weight value in the range [0−1]. As previously
noted, the most frequent pair of letters in Arabic is ( È@), so it
will be used here to tune the weights for the objective function
components, as explained below:
Fig. 2. Modified Uniform Crossover
• The letters ( @) and ( È) should be placed in the middle
row. So, the row weight value will be started from
zero and then increased gradually until these letters
are placed in the middle row in the final solution.

• The letter ( @ ) must be placed to the right of ( È ). So,

the hit direction constant will be started from zero and
then increased gradually until these letters are in the
order ( È@).

• Finally, it is very important to have the letters ( È@ )

next to each other, so the distance weigh must be set
high enough to accomplish that.

At the beginning of the tuning phase, the only weight that

Fig. 3. Two Point Crossover
The neighborhood moves that have been used are again swap
and insertion.
IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
The GA was implemented using Matlab r2012a. The
selection method used is Roulette Wheel selection, and the
replacement method is elitist replacement, where the replace-
ment rate determines the percentage of best individuals from
the old generation that replaces the worst individuals in the
new generation. The stopping condition is a certain number of
iterations without improvement. To tune the GA parameters,
extensive parameter tuning process was performed. The final
parameter set used was as follows:
• Population Size=50
• Crossover rate= 0.7
• Mutation Rate= 0.2
• Replacement rate= 0.2
• Number of iterations without improvement= 20
The SA parameters are:
we considered was the distance weight, where its value was
set to 1, while the other weights were set to 0. Then the row
weight was increased by 0.1 in each step, while the distance
weight was decreased with the same value. The letters ( @) and
( È) were placed in the middle row when the row weight was
set to 0.1, and the distance weight was set to 0.9., The same
process was done when tuning the hit direction weight. The
letters were ordered in the order ( È@ ) when the hit direction
weight was set to 0.2. Hence, the final objective function
weights are: 0.7, 0.1, and 0.2 for the distance weight, the row
weight and the hit direction weight respectively.
B. Computational Results
To test the results of the algorithm, each crossover method
(2-point crossover, and modified uniform crossover) was tested
with the tho mutation types: swap and insertion, as well as
combined with a SA with swap neighborhood move, and a SA
with insertion neighborhood move. Table I shows the results
of each of these experiments, where each one was repeated 10
times.
At the end of each run, the following information was
recorded:

• Initial temperature= 1000

• The average objective of the initial population
• Number of iterations per temperature =10 • The best objective in the initial population

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TABLE I. GA E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS

Experiment AVG Init Best AVG Final Best % Improvement AVG Generations
1- TPX & swap 259.0057 192.9269 26% 228
2- TPX &insertion 260.5488 201.289 23% 126
3- TPX &SA with swap 255.284 209.9335 18% 63
4- TPX&SA with insertion 250.2043 213.6137 15% 63
5- MUX & swap 255.4687 193.1369 24% 181
6- MUX & insertion 258.2569 201.4018 22% 103
7- MUX & SA with swap 257.4219 208.598 19% 52
8- MUX & SA with insertion 259.7359 206.9626 20% 57

• The average objective of the final population

• The best objective in the final population

In order to estimate the improvement of the best solution

in the population, the averages of the objective value for the (a) (b)
best solution in the initial population and best solution in the
final population of each experiment (10 runs) were calculated.
The percent improvement of the average for the best solutions
between the initial and final populations is also shown in Table
I. (c) (d)
As the table indicates, the highest percentage of improve-
ment was given in experiment 1 (TPX with swap mutation),
with 26% improvement. It can also be noticed from Table I
that the swap mutation generates better solutions with both
crossover methods, followed by the insertion mutation. Also, (e) (f)
the improvement percentage was slightly more when using the
two-point crossover than the modified uniform crossover. Fig. 4. Best GA Keyboard Layouts
On the other hand, the best final solution objective was
obtained by the modified uniform crossover with the swap
mutation (experiment 5). When we compared the resulting
keyboard layouts in experiments 1 and 5, all the produced
solutions in experiment 5 satisfied the hit direction and row especially the pair ( È@) is always at the center.When looking at
placement of the test case of the pair letters ( È@ ), while four the frequencies of the letters placed in the middle, we found
solutions in experiment 1 had there order reversed ( @ È). that they belong to the top ten in the frequency list. Also, the
letters with the lowest frequencies are placed at the edges.
The experiments showed that the GA with SA did not result
in better average objectives in comparison with the simple
To test the best produced keyboard, other keyboards layouts
mutation methods. Moreover, most of these solutions did not
satisfy the test case of the pair ( È@); they were either reversed,
(shown in Fig. 5) were evaluated using our objective function.
Table II shows the results of the improvement percent of our
in different rows, or both. The reason could be that the best keyboard (Fig. 4(a)) compared to other layouts.
“fast track” improvement during the SA created “super fit”
individuals that may dominate the population, leading to pre-
mature convergence of the GA. As mentioned previously, the optimized keyboard produced
by [7], and [2] are meant for many-finger keyboards; so we
The objective of the best solution found in all experiments can notice that the pair ( È@ ) are placed separately from each
was 190.3563 shown in Fig. 4(a), and was obtained from other. This is favorable for m-finger keyboards, because each
experiment 5, although the best average objective was obtained letter will be typed with different fingers in different hands.
from the experiment 1. However, the difference is too small. However, in s-finger keyboards, this is undesirable, which is
Fig. 4 shows the keyboard layouts that have the best ob- evident when the m-finger keyboards are evaluated using our
jectives, where (a), (b), (c), (d), (e), and (f) have the objectives objective function. So, it can be observed that these keyboards
190.3563, 190.7345, 191.318, 191.7295, 191.8237, 191.8237 are not well suited for s-finger devices. On the other hand,
respectively. The layouts (b), (c), and (d) are produced from when calculating the objective of the iOS keyboard layout,
experiment 1 and the rest are produced from experiment 5. our layout is better by 29%.
The letters ( @) and ( È) are highlighted in the resulting layouts.
As for our keyboard obtained in [1], this s-finger keyboard
It can be noticed from Fig. 4 that all best six keyboards considers only the hit direction besides the distance. So, we
placed the pair ( È@) in the correct order except for the layout calculated its objective twice: once when the row weight
(d). Also, he least frequent letters are placed at the bordered counts, and another when the row weight does not count.
sides, however the most frequent ones are placed at the middle, Its objective is close to the obtained keyboard in the current

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(a) Korshid [7] (b) Malas et al. [2]
(c) iOS (d) [1]
Fig. 5. Other Keyboard Layouts
TABLE II. C OMPARISON WITH OTHER K EYBOARD L AYOUTS
Keyboard Objective % Imprv.
Khorshid et al. [7] 301.2801 58%
iOS 205.2760 29%
[1] with row weight 193.5666 1.9%
[1] without row weight 199.8290 2.24%
approach, as can be seen in Table II.
Moreover, to test the performance of our GA against
other metaheuristics using the same objective functions, we
implemented an SA algorithm with the following parameters
setting:
• Initial Temperature Tmax = 10000
• Maximum number of iterations Mmax = 10
• Maximum number of iterations in the same tempera-
ture Lmax = 15
• Cooling rate α = 0.98
• Stopping criteria: kmax = 20 iterations without im-
provement
The SA algorithm starts with a randomly generated solu-
tion. Then the regular SA steps, with a swap neighborhood
move, are followed. However, we adopted the same stopping
criterion as the GA, i.e., the algorithm was stopped when
the solution is not improved for a pre-specified number of
iterations. This stopping condition was adopted in both the
general SA cooling process, and in the number of iterations
per temperature.
The SA algorithm was run for 10 times. The average
objective function result for the 10 runs was 194.9195, which
is slightly worse than the average produced by the best GA
experiments (experiments 1 and 5 that use the swap mutation).
However, the average produced by the SA was better than the
average produced by the other GA experiments. The average
percent improvement between the initial and final solution for
the 10 runs was 38%. In addition, the best result produced
by the SA was 190.3687, which is very close to the best
result produced by the GA. This indicates, in general, that
our objective function is robust and can produce good results
with different metaheuristics. Fig. 6 shows the best resulting
keyboard optimized using SA.
The SA needed an average of 108.1 iterations to reach
the final results. However, in terms of processing time, the
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Fig. 6. The Best Keyboard Layout using SA
Fig. 7. The estimated human time (in seconds) to type the text for
each test case (10 articles in each discipline)
SA algorithm seems to be much faster than the GA, which
is rather expected due to the population nature of the GA.
The average time needed by the GA for 10 runs ranged from
7.38 to 112.79 seconds, while the average time needed by the
SA in 10 runs was only 1.56 seconds, albeit using a different
computer than the one used in the GA. It should be noted,
though, that the processing time is not critical in this type of
optimization, since the optimization is done only once and the
result is adopted for long term use.
Finally, to test the effectiveness of our best resulting
keyboard layouts from both the GA and the SA in terms of the
writing speed. We developed an algorithm that virtually esti-
mates the speed of typing, using the distances between letters
in a text. In this experiment, we considered 50 articles covering
different disciplines (10 articles in each) and randomly chosen
from the Arabic newspapers “Al Jazeera” and “Asharq Al-
Awsat”. We computed the distance, and then the movement
time, needed to type a given text. The movement time is
computed using Fitts’ law [8], with the settings indicated in
Equations (2) and (3) above.
We used this metric to evaluate and compare the optimized
keyboard arrangements to the standard Arabic keyboard used
in the commercial mobile devices, specifically the the iOS
devices.
Fig. 7 shows the estimated time, in seconds, required to
type the given texts by the different layouts. It turned out
that, for all the test cases, the estimated movement times of
the optimized layouts are less than the standard keyboard.
We notice also the performance stability of the optimized
keyboards regardless of the different domains. The average
improvement percent for all texts was 15% for the GA over
the iOS, and 14% for the SA over the iOS.
Using Fitts’ law shows that the optimized layouts outper-
form the standard Arabic keyboard used in mobile devices.
But this law assumes that the movement time depends only on
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the distance. The rows’ weights and hit direction components
in our objective function depend on human behaviour and
actually are not reflected by Fitts’ law. So, the theoretically
optimized new layouts require an assessment involving end-
users and comparing them from a practical point of view.
V. C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE D IRECTIONS
In this research, we aimed to design an Arabic keyboard
that optimizes the keys arrangement for applications that
predominantly use just a single pointer. Since the s-finger
keyboard layout problem can be modeled as the well-known
Quadratic Assignment Problem (QAP), it can be tackled using
different metaheuristics that have been used for solving the
QAP.
The main contributions of this research are: first, we
calculated the frequencies of the Arabic letters using a large
collection of diverse Arabic articles. Second, we included
new measures in the objective function for optimizing the
keyboard design, namely: the row weight and the hit direction,
which take into account the user’s convenience and the specific
property of the Arabic language in terms of the typing direction
from right to left. Third, we developed a new genetic algorithm
approach, where two kinds of crossover operators were imple-
mented: 2-point crossover and modified uniform crossover. The
GA was tested with two mutation methods (swap and insertion)
and combined with a SA. The GA was also compared against
a stand-alone SA approach using the same objective function.
A thorough experimental framework was conducted to test
the performance of the implemented algorithms. The experi-
mental results showed that simple swap mutation performed
better than the other tested approaches with both crossover
types. No benefit was realized from hybridising the GA with
SA, neither in solution quality nor in processing time. The
results also showed a noticeable improvement of the keyboard
layout obtained over multiple finger and conventional single
finger keyboards, in terms of the criteria targeted in our
optimization approach: namely the total distance, the row
weight and the hit direction. Comparing the GA with an SA
using the same objective function yielded comparable results
in terms of the solution quality obtained. Testing the speed
of typing based on the separating distances between the keys,
the results indicate that the layouts produced by our GA and
SA algorithms outperform the layout used by iOS portable
devices. The proposed metaheuristic framework, and especially
the objective function, can also be used to optimizing single
finger keyboards for other languages that are written from right
to left, like Hebrew, Persian Punjabi, and Urdu.
Finally, although the new proposed layout may be optimum
from a theoretical perspective, a new arrangement of keys, even
if better, may be resisted by users. Therefore, an assessment
involving end-users is essential to determine the effectiveness
of the proposed layout from a practical point of view. In
fact, the proposed optimized layouts in the literature have
been tested only from a mathematical point of view, and
there is no study up-to-date that tests end-users feedback and
satisfaction. For our future research directions, we intend to
evaluate the new layout using Eye Tracking technology. Using
performance measures and subjective satisfaction measures can
help determine the most convenient layout in realistic settings.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This project was supported in part by a grant awarded from
the Research Center in King Saud University (RC121241).
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