What if you could, in one month, become twice as productive? What if you also became able to think twice as fast?

The truth is, you can. And it’s actually a really simple, straightforward path.

The above benefits are available through ELIA Frames Touch Typing System.

What makes ELIA Frames unique?

It enables you to finish learning touch typing with greater confidence and in less time. You see, many people start learning to touch type. But few finish learning it. And until now, they had good reason, the exercises included so many errors because they were using two bump keyboards. With only two bumps, learner’s fingers would become misplaced part way through the exercise, and they would have to attempt it all over again. ELIA Frames cuts down the number of errors per exercise and, therefore, the amount of time it takes to learn touch typing. Furthermore, during the exercises, learners are more confident in their keystrokes, improving their muscle memory feedback loop. So their brain and body are learning faster because they have more feedback and success. And our bodies love feedback and success.

The ELIA Frames™ Keyboard Overlay

Make your fingers more productive and happy.

What Is ELIA Frames?

The ELIA Frames Font is simply the standard alphabet, customized for touch reading and recognition. Each letter elements are organized for touch identification because touch identification requires that the letters’ shapes to be laid out systematically. Because ELIA Frames is just the standard alphabet, it can be learned in minutes and is easy to recognize with your fingers.

Those few minutes it takes to learn ELIA Frames pay huge dividends when you start to learn touch typing.

How The ELIA Typing System Works

After a few minutes invested in learning the ELIA Frames Font, learning the skill of touch typing with the overlay is much faster than traditional methods where the keyboards have only two bumps (the bumps being on the keys F & G). Your investment in learning ELIA Frames cuts the touch typing learning time by as much as 50% and helps you type faster for the rest of your life. It makes the process funner and lowers the stress level of learning a new skill. With ELIA, you will make fewer mistakes than with the existing two bump keyboards because, from the moment you start learning touch typing, you can know where your fingers are at all times. The ELIA Frames touch letters give you confidence that your keystrokes will be accurate. And each time you make correct keystrokes, your muscle memory is positively reinforced. Your practice is better because of ELIA. And with better practice, you don’t have to unlearn the incorrect movements you would be making if you used a normal non-touch keyboard.

Why Learn Touch Typing?

Imagine if you were twice as productive and thought twice as fast. What kind of worker, student, or creative would you be then?

That’s what learning touch typing could do for you.

We can only think as fast as we type. It’s true. The thoughts that you are having while typing are bottlenecked by your typing speed. There may be parts of your brain that would fire up for greater creativity if you had the faster typing skills to engage them.

The average non-touch typist types 35 words per minute. If you invested 15-30 minutes a day for a month, you could type at 70 wpm. And for the rest of your life, you would be twice as productive.

Twice. As. Productive.

What a life you would have then, with that core secret weapon in your pocket!

To put that another way, 15 hours of focused, disciplined practice over a month could enable you to do 15 hours more work per week for the rest of your life. It’s kind of nuts!

But people don’t do that because typing with the normal two bump keyboard includes so much unnecessary failure in the form of typing errors. When you can only tell when two of your fingers are on the right keys, there is a lot of failure. Learners attempt to accurately complete the same exercise over and over, not seeing much improvement. And each keystroke is done with the uncertainty that comes from not knowing where your fingers are on the normal keyboard.

Meanwhile, those typists know how comfortable and fast they are without trying to touch type. They do just fine (30-40 wpm) with their organic way of typing.

But the ELIA Frames overlay is different. It helps you with every keystroke if you need it. It ensures that you can type accurately. And typing accurately without looking at the keyboard is the key to typing faster.

Efficient typing enables us to think faster. It enables us to do our tasks in less time, so we have more time for non-typing activities. If we are doing something competitive, like work, homework, or gaming, typing faster and more accurately gives us a competitive advantage over people who don’t type quickly and accurately.

Did you know that the average person who earns over $100,000 per year spends 80% of their work days on the computer. That’s 32 hours a week. Touch typing would be like giving yourself 32 hours more time to get stuff done, or enable you to do what you used to do in 16 hours, instead of 32. You could spend the other 16 hours learning new skills or thinking more creatively.

How Does The ELIA Frames Keyboard Overlay Help?

The ELIA Frames™ Keyboard Overlay incorporates the ELIA Frames Touch Font into a silicon guide sheet that helps users know where their fingers always are. Your fingers easily identify the font letter on each key, and with that aid you will choose each keystroke with greater speed and confidence. You make fewer mistakes, type with greater confidence and can therefore type faster.

See the ELIA Frames video below to learn it. Then test yourself!

Designing the ELIA Frames Font

Our Process

“We have gone to great lengths testing and refining ELIA Frames™ to maximize its learnability. Over 200,000 test subject responses were collected and analyzed. The key design principle that was applied, in order to leverage a person’s finger sensitivity, was to make each character’s design simple but unique, and to space each letter’s features far apart enough that they can be easily recognized.” - Reed DeWinter, ELIA Industrial designer

The Result

The ELIA Frames™ font is designed for maximum tactile discrimination by people with a visual impairment. It is so easy to learn that it can be studied and applied to extended reading in as little as 2 hours. And because ELIA Frames™ is based on the standard Roman alphabet, it can be read visually by those with full sight (teachers, caregivers, or co-workers). 

Public Benefit Corporation Statement

On November 1st, 2017, ELIA Life Technology, Inc. became a public benefit corporation (PBC). Shareholders and the board of directors voted unanimously to change the new for-profit corporate status.

Being a PBC enables the company to pursue and generate profits, while also investing in its social mission – to enable people who are blind or have a visual impairment to obtain full education and employment, and maintain their literacy and independence. We believe that by investing in the well-being of our customers, we can change the economic dynamics of our community.

Read more here.

Funding Partners

Funding for our research has been provided by foundations, the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Institute for Standards and Technology (NIST), the NYSTAR Small Business Technology Jumpstart Program, and from private individuals.

Initial basic research funding was provided by the Langeloth Foundation and the State University of New York Research Foundation. Subsequent product and curriculum development funding was provided NYSTAR and the Small Business Innovation Research Grant programs of NIH (the National Eye Institute and the National Institute on Aging) and NIST.

Roughly $450,000 in angel investments seeded the development of the earliest stages of our work, and helped us attract roughly $2.7 million in research support from the above institutions.

Research Partners

ELIA Life Technology has several research partners that it collaborates with closely:

MOUSE Corps

SUNY College of Optometry

Visions

Center for Technology and School Change

Columbia Teacher's College

Cornell University
Department of Materials Science & Engineering

Lighthouse Guild International