Like anyone who eventually gets tired of making so many typos when typing Japanese in romaji, I eventually switched to the 12キー “flick” keyboard and haven’t looked back.
It takes a little getting used to, but it quickly enough becomes second-nature, and the frequency of typos drops off a cliff. At least, this has been my experience, so I’m a huge fan.
But I recently found myself wishing I could swipe when doing kana input and then got to thinking about the ergonomics and logistics of making that a thing.
As far as I can tell, there don’t seem to be any Japanese IMEs that allow one to swipe from one kana to another, so it’s very likely I’m barking up the wrong tree, but I’d appreciate it if anyone with a deeper sense of the language could point out why it’s a bad idea at a fundamental level.
I did confirm my suspicion that there would be far too much ambiguity in just swiping from any one “hitbox” to the next (か » あ » ら could be twenty different words), but it feels to me like it might work if you had to aim slightly away from center to indicate variation; that is, if you hit one of the cardinal directions, it would be interpreted as, tatoeba, a き/く/け/こ.
I suspect that would require a prohibitive degree of dexterity unless the buttons were enlarged considerably, so I was also thinking that the system could provide a bit of leniency at the corners, such that if your swipe comes to a stop somewhere in the top-right of か’s hitbox, it could be interpreted as a か, く, or け, with the determination not being made until you’ve finished swiping, at which point a dictionary lookup would kick in to calculate and present the handful of words you could’ve meant (much like as is done when swiping in other languages).
As I say, I’m sure there’s some very good reason why this isn’t a thing, but the hard blockers aren’t immediately obvious to me. Or perhaps it does exist, but the people who say “swipe” instead of “flick” have sufficiently muddied the waters that I wasn’t able to find it?
In any event, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’ll probably end up putting together a proof of concept to play around with the idea, but I’d be overjoyed to find out that someone has already done so and I just missed it.