Velotype

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The Velotype

Velotype is the old trademark for a type of keyboard for typing text known as a syllabic chord keyboard, an invention of the Dutchmen Nico Berkelmans and Marius den Outer. The current tradename is Veyboard. Veyboard is a Dutch company.

Contrary to traditional QWERTY type keyboards, on which a typist usually presses one key at a time to create one character at a time, a Veyboard requires the user to press several keys simultaneously, producing syllables rather than letters.

A practiced "veyboarder" can produce more text than on a traditional keyboard, as much as 200 words per minute, double the rate of a fast traditional typist. Because of this, Veyboards are often used for live applications, such as subtitling for television and for the hearing impaired.

The keyboard is an orthographic chordkeyboard, very different from chordphonetic keyboards used for verbatim transcription, such as Stenotype, as these are mainly for stenography, which depend on phonetic codes representing speech. Such keyboards are generally more difficult to learn than Veyboard, but trained operators can go faster, even higher than 200 words per minute.

Another advantage to Veyboard is that the result is readable text. Unless converted afterwards, the result of phonetic keyboards is stenography shorthand, which is unreadable to untrained persons.