Fact · Typing and writing speed
20percent of time
Touch typists spent about 20 percent of the time they were copying text looking at the keyboard.
Checked against its source on October 16, 2026
In the source's own words
“In our data, non-touch typists used 40 % of their time looking at the keyboard, whereas touch typists spent only 20 %.”
How We Type: Movement Strategies and Performance in Everyday Typing, Anna Maria Feit et al., Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2016, Results (eye gaze).
Open the original (DOI 10.1145/2858036.2858233)- What it measures
- Measured with eye-tracking glasses during the transcription task. The share is the time spent looking at the keyboard while a sentence was on screen.
- What it does not show
- One lab task with 30 participants. It does not show how much people look at the keyboard in their everyday work.
Source
Used to calculate
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