The article and the paper are a nice find that I plan to share on the Colemak forum.
One thing I've found is that a layout that is highly optimized for touch typing is terrible for swiping. I touch-type Colemak on hardware keyboards; for those who don't know, it's a layout optimized for fast and ergonomic typing in English (there are variants for some other languages), without being as different from QWERTY as Dvorak is. SwiftKey supports Colemak out of the box for English, so I tried it. I normally use SwiftKey Flow for writing long bits of text on my tablet.
My experience with Flow and Colemak was that the rate of errors was much higher -- there were far more ambiguities, mainly because many of the most common letters are on the home row (arst neio), and so you're often just swiping back and forth across the home row, which could mean anything. You also end up having to swipe farther, because of more lateral movement from one end of the keyboard to the other, and less top-to-bottom movement.
I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who's tried swiping on a Dvorak layout.
One final note, if anyone hasn't seen MessageEase, they should check it out. It's a compelely different model for typing that involves a very compact and optimized layout to minimize finger movement, as well as a mixture of tapping and swiping. If it had the benefit of SwiftKey's language model, I'd use it for everything, but as it stands, I use it mainly where completion is not available (e.g. in terminal sessions).
One thing I've found is that a layout that is highly optimized for touch typing is terrible for swiping. I touch-type Colemak on hardware keyboards; for those who don't know, it's a layout optimized for fast and ergonomic typing in English (there are variants for some other languages), without being as different from QWERTY as Dvorak is. SwiftKey supports Colemak out of the box for English, so I tried it. I normally use SwiftKey Flow for writing long bits of text on my tablet.
My experience with Flow and Colemak was that the rate of errors was much higher -- there were far more ambiguities, mainly because many of the most common letters are on the home row (arst neio), and so you're often just swiping back and forth across the home row, which could mean anything. You also end up having to swipe farther, because of more lateral movement from one end of the keyboard to the other, and less top-to-bottom movement.
I'd be interested in hearing the experiences of anyone who's tried swiping on a Dvorak layout.
One final note, if anyone hasn't seen MessageEase, they should check it out. It's a compelely different model for typing that involves a very compact and optimized layout to minimize finger movement, as well as a mixture of tapping and swiping. If it had the benefit of SwiftKey's language model, I'd use it for everything, but as it stands, I use it mainly where completion is not available (e.g. in terminal sessions).