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product on the grounds that Alt-I considered a lot of human factor engineering and
other social issues, which Lancor seems to have overlooked in their keyboard design”
(Adegbola 2003). I do not know the details of the issues between the two efforts, but
with a population of about 120 million the Nigerian market is large enough for more
keyboards. I now turn to the development of the Igbo keyboard.
2.2.4 The Igbo Keyboard
This is simply an effort that arose through my collaboration with Andrew
Cunningham. The effort is not supported by any business or charity organisation. From
the outset, the focus was to find a solution that would exploit the already available
keyboard layouts and adapt them for the Igbo language without building a physical
keyboard from scratch.
There are many virtual keyboards on the net that could be altered to that effect,
but Tavultesoft’s (www.tavultesoft.com) ‘Keyman’ program was found to be the best.
Two possible physical keyboards came into consideration at the initial stage: the
German keyboard and the English keyboard. The drawback of the English keyboard is
the requirement to hold down or combine not less than three different keys in order
to realise a single subdotted character. Such a method is tedious and not particularly
appealing. That is why I chose the German keyboard. The special German characters
can thus be replaced with specific Igbo characters as shown in Table 1 below.
The third column of Table 1 shows a further combination of the subdotted
characters with tone marks. Through the collaboration with Andrew Cunningham,
all these and many other changes (especially with regard to the consonants) were
incorporated and used to build an Igbo keyboard layout that can freely be downloaded
from the Tavultesoft website. Later a similar keyboard map was also made for the
English keyboard for people who have access only to the English keyboard. But as
has already been pointed out, the users of the English keyboard simply have to cope
with the tedious key combinations. I have therefore donated the Tavultesoft keyboard
program, together with physical German keyboards, to the Department of Nigerian
Languages at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as well as to some other Igbo scholars;
since then I have been receiving feedback that was further incorporated to refine
the program for both the average user as well as for the linguist’s most complicated
needs. This has led to the development of the second version of the program. Due to
the use of the English language in Nigeria, the third version of the program has now
been made QWERTY-based like the English and Danish keyboards, thus replacing the
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