British and American keyboards
Categories: American and British English differences | Computer keyboards
There are two major English language keyboard layouts, the United States layout and the United Kingdom layout. US users do not generally need the £ and € symbols, or the Gaelic accented vowels (á, é, í, ó, or ú), while those are common needs in the UK. The UK layout accordingly adds an AltGr key, maps the £ to where the US layout has a #, and adds a 102nd key to accommodate the #. A few variations not strictly driven by function (the reversals of @ and " between the two, the movement of ~ to the # key to accommodate a ¬ on the backquote key) have also crept in between the two.
Older operating systems handled both the differences between the two keyboards and the differences between American English and British English by having two English language options -- a UK setting and a US setting. While adequate for users in the United States, United Kingdom, and Ireland, this solution caused difficulty in other English-speaking countries. In many Commonwealth countries and other English-speaking jurisdictions (e.g., Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, and South Africa), local spelling, grammar, and vocabulary strongly conformed to British English usage, while the keyboard used the United States layout. People in these countries were forced to choose between a keyboard layout incompatible with their hardware, or having their spell checker software complain about locally-correct spelling like 'colour'.
However, in most modern operating systems, the number of options were increased, allowing users to select the correct keyboard and dialect. In modern versions of Microsoft Windows, one is given a number of default options for locality that will usually correctly match dialect and keyboard. Further, even if your hardware keyboard layout does not match the device driver software layout that was pre-selected, you can change that without changing the regional setting.