For data entry specialists, stenographers, medical transcriptionists, and other similar professions, the ability to type quickly and accurately is essential. People who are outside of the tech world may think that computer programmers also need this skill, but that could not be further from the truth.

For as much effort as software engineers put into customizing their development environments for the sake of efficiency, most readily admit that typing speed has no meaningful impact on productivity. For any sizable programming task, the time spent thinking is orders of magnitude greater than the time spent typing.

Knowing this to be true, I never put much stock in my own considerable abilities as a touch typist. It’s convenient, and comes in handy for playing The Typing of the Dead, but isn’t necessary. My thoughts on the matter changed recently when I discovered that typing proficiency may be having a significant impact on my digital communications.

I have one colleague at work who is a truly incredible engineer. While working with them I noticed that they frequently requested to use voice chat. I figured it was just their preference, and was happy to oblige. One day during a casual conversation they mentioned that they were a hunt-and-peck typist.

It wasn’t immediate, but later that day I put two and two together. When using Slack I was burying this person in a wall of text. If they could keep up with reading it all, they definitely couldn’t reply fast enough. Their preference for voice chat made perfect sense.

Upon further reflection I began to see how this dynamic might be invisibly impacting participation in other text-based digital communities. I’m very active in a few chat servers and web forums outside of work. When discussions in those spaces get lively, I notice that the same people are dominating every conversation.

I had previously assumed this was a matter of personality. Even in face to face conversation some people are more vocal than others. For the most part this does carry over into other mediums of communication. The people I know to have quieter personalities are quiet online and off. Yet, only a subset of the people who are vocal in real life are also active in the chat. I believe lack of typing ability is one of the reasons these people are not expressing themselves in cyberspace the same way they do in meatspace.

Consider the case where I am away from home, and only have my phone with me. In this scenario I will ignore a busy chat. I can’t participate fully without a keyboard, so I don’t participate at all. I’ll never know how often others make the same choice.

Through this lens many software features and user behaviors take on a new light. Are the people who send voice messages, or use the dictation feature, doing it because they find typing difficult and slow? Are the people who talk to Siri, Alexa, and Google doing it because they are better at talking than typing? Are people happy to use large language models (LLM) to compose an email doing it to reduce the labor of writing, or also to avoid the chore of typing? Is my proficiency the reason I find none of those features to be personally useful?

I’ve focused on typing so far, but does this apply to reading as well? In school I was the type of student who always read books in full. My classmates occasionally used things like CliffsNotes to save time. Many people find reading to be unpleasant. The more words there are to read, the less likely they are to read them. Reading speed also varies wildly.

This could partially explain the success of social media over long form blogs. It could explain why some people are excited to use LLMs to summarize longer texts. It explains why some people might check out of fast-moving conversations in chat rooms. When many people are typing, messages may be appearing on screen faster than users are able to read them.

The end result of this is that people who are better at typing and reading seem to have an extreme advantage in a real-time text-based chat. Faster typing allows someone to put more text into the chat in less time. Faster reading allows someone to start writing their next message while other participants are still reading the previous message.

In the workplace, multiple speedsters together may be able to communicate more effectively. This could translate into real gains in productivity. If that is true, then typing speed is a very important skill for all knowledge workers, not just software engineers. Conversely, large disparities in typing ability could negatively impact diversity of thought. I hope someone makes a scientific study of it.

As for solutions, I think we just need to begin with awareness. Acknowledging the potential problem allows us to recognize and accommodate those who are most impacted by it. We should not hesitate to make more use of features like voice chats with automated transcription. As long as text chat is still a dominant mode of communication, we should provide educational resources and encourage people to learn touch-typing.

It can also not be understated how much of an accessibility issue this could be. Accessibility features might be enough to allow users with different abilities to participate. However, if the features are too slow, they may not allow all users to participate as equals.

I apologize, but I must conclude with one potentially troubling thought. How many executives demanding their employees return to office are doing so in part because they themselves are slow typists and/or slow readers, and are therefore less effective in a remote work environment?