Test Any Keyboard Layout: AZERTY, QWERTZ, Dvorak, JIS and 24 More
key-test Editorial Team3 min read
The keyboard tester now draws your keyboard the way it is actually printed. Pick from 28 layouts in the new Layout menu, open a dedicated page for each one, and, if you use a non-US system layout, enjoy a fix that finally lights up every key.
Until today, the virtual keyboard on key-test.com was always a US board. If you type on a German, French, Japanese or Thai keyboard, the picture did not match the keys under your fingers, and, worse, some keys did not light up at all. Both of those are fixed.
A Layout menu on every page
Above the virtual keyboard, next to the PC and Mac switch, there is now a Layout menu. It lists 28 layouts grouped by script:
- Latin: US and UK QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, French AZERTY, German QWERTZ, Spanish (Spain) and Latin American, Italian, Portuguese (Portugal) and Brazilian ABNT2, Swedish/Finnish, Danish, Norwegian, Turkish Q, Czech, Hungarian and Serbian Latin.
- Cyrillic and Greek: Russian and Ukrainian ЙЦУКЕН, Greek.
- Middle East: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian.
- Asia: Thai Kedmanee, Korean Dubeolsik, Japanese JIS and Taiwanese Zhuyin.
Choosing a layout redraws the keycaps and, where the physical board is different, the shape of the keyboard too: ISO boards get the tall Enter and the extra key beside the left Shift, JIS boards get the ¥ and ろ keys and the three keys around the spacebar, and ABNT2 boards get the second extra key next to the right Shift. Your choice is remembered, and the counts you have already collected stay on the keys when you switch.
Each language version of the site now opens with the layout its readers most likely have. The German page starts on QWERTZ, the French page on AZERTY, the Japanese page on JIS, the Thai page on Kedmanee, and so on. You can always switch to any other layout; the page language and the keyboard layout are independent.
The fix for non-US system layouts
The tester used to identify keys by the character your operating system produced. On a US layout that works, but on a German system the key to the right of L produces ö, on a Russian one ж, on a Thai one ว, and none of those matched a key on the picture, so the key never lit up.
Detection now uses the physical key the keyboard reports, the browser's event.code. Press a key and it lights up regardless of the input language or the characters it types. The record bar above the keyboard still shows the actual character, so Thai, Russian or Arabic users see their own letters there.
A page for every layout
Every layout has its own page under Keyboard Layouts, for example the AZERTY keyboard test or the JIS keyboard test. Each page fixes the tester to that layout and adds a table, generated from the same data that draws the keyboard, of every key that differs from US QWERTY and every extra physical key.
It can tell when you picked the wrong one
If you start typing and the characters you produce do not match the keycaps on screen, the tester quietly offers to switch to the layout that does match. On Chromium browsers it can also read your system layout directly. It never switches on its own, and once you dismiss a suggestion it stays dismissed.
If your layout is missing or a keycap is printed differently from your keyboard, tell us through the Comments link in the navigation. The layouts are plain data files, so corrections are quick to ship.