Interesting enough article, however it's a bit odd captioning a Japanese woman using (presumably) a Japanese typewriter with the text "Early Chinese typewriters had thousands of keys to search through."
That's my first thought as well, but the picture could have been a kanji (or just straight Japanese) typewriter, which is similar enough to a Chinese typewriter that it makes sense to use the image. But with that in mind, the caption does not make sense. The author or whoever inserted images probably did not know the woman was Japanese.
The author probably knew that she was Japanese considering that he wrote the book about the subject matter, although the picture might have been captioned by some editor.
I'd suspect that it is the same image that appears on his book in chapter called "Controlling the Kanjisphere", so I guess it covers japanese typewriters:
Do we know for sure that's not a Chinese typewriter being used by a Chinese/Japanese/Korean woman dressed in a kimono during, say, Manchu Kuo China (for example)?
The MingKwai does sound similar to the Wubi (五笔 ⸺ 5 strokes) method. You type the individual components of a character or word, and any ambiguity is resolved by selecting from a short list.
For example, 比如 (= "for example") is typed "xxvk", where "x" → 匕, "v" → 女, "k" → 口. 名字 (= "name") is typed "qkpb", where "q" → 夕, "k" → 口, "p" → 宀， "b" → 子.
Of course most keys can stand for several characters (or components), and it can be hard to tell which one to use (for me), but the amount of ambiguity is surprisingly small.
It's familiar because that's the only way to do it with shape. You either select a character by shape or by pinyin. The key challenge here is to design a system that
1. can cover most characters with relative small shape collection
2. use less selection steps
3. easy to learn and memorize
Wubi is optimized on the goal to determine a character with 4 shapes with almost no alternative candidate, so the raw input speed is optimized (4 keystroke for one character, and you don't need to select in most time), but it require a lot of time learning. That enabled typewriter as an job.
Later people found pinyin + good word prediction can achieve acceptable speed, the typewriter job doesn't exist anymore.
However it's still quite painful to input ancient Chinese prose, because most of them are single character word, so you have to select from a long list of characters with same pinyin (in word mode you just input pinyin of two characters, the pinyin combination have much less alternatives). Some pinyin have about 20-30 common used characters, like "ji", "yi" etc.
It's worth pointing out that in China, QWERTY with pinyin (Latin characters representing pronunciation with an IME mapping it to Chinese) is the most popular input method.
Japanese similarly is primarily done with QWERTY and an IME. Other layouts do exist but they're not very common.
Chinese input is quite varied though. Taiwan uses Zhuyin (or bopomofo) which is a phonetic alternative that doesn't use Latin. Hong Kong, Cantonese, and/or misc. types of Chinese may use other methods like Cangjie (which does use a QWERTY layout). Cangjie is notable for not being phonetic at all -- likely similar to the typewriter input methods mentioned in the article. Words are typed as ordered sequences of pseudo-radicals (pieces of Chinese characters) that are memorized by their associations to Latin letters and color[0].
Although there's no real reason either Japanese or pinyin IMEs should have to use QWERTY -- in fact it's likely quite suboptimal as neither make use of all the keys, or at least not as a primary function (many IMEs are configurable and/or allow non-standard characters to map to more complex sequences of input). I personally use both through Dvorak (which, being optimized for English, is similarly suboptimal).
As for voice input, Chinese is easier than Japanese because of the larger phonetic inventory and use of tones to form minimal pairs. Although the different types of Chinese (regional dialects (as opposed to different Chinese languages)) and their variations in pronunciation complicate things. Japanese does have pitch accent, but it's not really consistent across Japan, so I don't know how helpful it would actually be for a voice recognition system.
Purely from personal experience, I can rarely get Japanese voice recognition to work if trying to search for a word in isolation. It's quite good with sentences though. This might just be an artifact of my poor pronunciation though.
I think typing in general, as it is now, is pretty primitive and has a lot of room to be improved. I've been tempted to try to make some new, and possibly more efficient, input methods, but haven't been able to justify giving any a try yet. I do think even an IME at the level of what currently exists in Chinese and Japanese would be wonderful to have for English though. Intelligent auto-complete, shortcuts, semantically aware insertion of unicode (Emoji are actually natural to use in IME-using languages; just type what you want and select the emoji that pops up).
There are several iterations of most popular input methods in mainland China (Cangjie is only used in HongKong area):
1. Numerous attempts were made by many people, try to encode thousands of Chinese characters in keyboard. The most popular one is Wubi, which can describe single character in 4 keystroke so you don't need to select from options. It's used by professional typewriters, and many regular users spend a lot of time to learn the system.
2. pinyin IME was improved, provided better prediction and word input(input a multi character word directly, instead one by one), it's acceptable even you need to select from a list, and you don't need to learn a system. Most casual users used the one provided by Windows Chinese version.
3. Whole sentence IME appeared, which was trained with Chinese text corpus, try to predict a whole sentence when you just input the pinyin for all of them. This proved to be short-lived since you still need to adjust several places in many cases, even it can get 100% correct in 30% cases.
4. All major IT companies start to develop their own IME as a method to collect user input and provide an entrance to their product.
5. An old IME: double pinyin start to gain more popularity. It's still pinyin, but you can use 2 letter to encode the whole pinyin instead of 4 or 6 letters. All newer IME can switch between different encoding methods, like pinyin, double pinyin, strokes.
6. Senior users tend to just use handwriting in smartphone.
Modern Chinese IME's use the pinyin-based predictive input methods (#1) as the primary method, together with a wubi-style method (#2) as a secondary input method. E.g. in the Sogou IME, if you type the 'u' (which can never begin any pinyin syllable), you can then type letters to denote strokes or common components, such as h for heng 一 , s for shu 丨 , p for pie 丿 , k for kou 口 , s for shui 水氺 or 氵 , etc. Can be useful to distinguish between characters for commonly used syllables such as 'yi', 'ji', etc.
Regarding #5, I found it's difficult to switch from normal pinyin to shuangpin (double pinyin) in one go, and none of the shuangpin methods or software provide staged switching. E.g. a shuangpin IME could allow me to use 'i', 'u' and 'v' to type 'ch', 'sh' and 'zh', but continue to use the existing vowel combinations (e.g. 'ue', 'ao') for stage 1 pinyin/shuangpin typing, and then offer at stage 2 shortcuts for some of the vowel combos only when I had gotten into the habit of the stage 1 shortcuts. Of course the choice of shortcuts available would then be constrained by the staged learning path, but because there's so many different shuangpin IME's available, each with differing key assignments and none of them standard, there's probably still room in the market for a new key assignment that caters to such staged learning.
The fcitx input method framework for Linux (https://fcitx-im.org) apparently has support for English auto-complete, although I never used that feature and don't see how to enable it.
What I do use it for is entering Unicode characters: press Ctrl-Alt-Shift-U to get a fuzzy search over all of Unicode, then type just enough of the description to select the right character in the shortlist, then you can enter it. Much better than googling to copy-paste.
I'd imagine that the fact that the vast majority of the rest of the world uses QWERTY makes it quite useful for the Japanese and Chinese to also use QWERTY despite the minor loss in optimal typing layout.
The kinds of keyboard you will find in Japan are all heavily localised with different mapping for symbols and a number of context switching keys squeezed in at the expense of the space bar[0]. This is usually not a problem for typing Japanese because words are not delimited by whitespace, however it can be awkward to type English on them especially if you have hands larger than the average Japanese office worker. China, on the other hand, uses US layout qwerty keyboards almost exclusively.
China never developed specialized keyboards since they were still not using many computers in the 70s/80s when this was a trend. Japan and Taiwan both developed pretty specialized keyboards for Japanese and Chinese, respectively, though this turned out to be not as productive as just using slightly modified QWERTY (which is why china didn't go down this same route in the 90s).
How do use these through Dvorak? I also use Dvorak although I only type in English and Spanish which are very similar. I make my custom layouts with Autohotkey so they are portable. I also have a page how to do such on Mac and Linux although there not as portable and feature rich as Autohotkey.
I use ibus on Linux, it has an option in the advanced settings to "Use system keyboard layout". This applies the default layout to all other input methods.
Notably Ubuntu comes with Dvorak for Japanese as a default, an option I've never seen anywhere else. So there might be special support for your use case. This solution doesn't scale well though.
My keyboards also both have hardware output to Dvorak, which would probably be the best option on other systems. It's been too long since I've used other systems to have a better answer than that though.
From a brief search, hardware transformers do exist, but they seem excessively expensive (QIDO is $150). You can buy a nice keyboard (with the option built in) for less than that price.
"transformed the Chinese keyboard into a 'smart' peripheral, much more sophisticated at taking instructions from the user than its static, rather stupid alphabetic cousin" - also can ensure what you type conforms to CCP dictates - see also: newspeak - pinyin ban incoming?
