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The keyboard France never fixed
France's own keyboard has made proper French hard to type since 1984 — a 2016 ministry report said as much, and the everyday workarounds are a story in themselves.
Press & Media
Typing proper French on France's own keyboard is surprisingly hard. A young Frenchman has spent nine years fixing it — without asking anyone to relearn how they type.
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Press contact
Interview requests, information, press material — in English or French
presse@azerty.globalThe story
In January 2016, the French Ministry of Culture published a damning report: it is impossible to type proper French on an AZERTY keyboard — the layout used on virtually every computer in France. No native accented capitals, no French quotation marks, no œ ligature...
Following this report, AFNOR (the French standards body) was commissioned to create a new standard. In 2019, the NF Z71-300 standard was published. But this official solution imposes too abrupt a break with the Windows AZERTY, only partially addresses developers' needs, and has struggled to catch on: very few compatible keyboards are sold and adoption remains marginal.
Meanwhile, Antoine Olivier — then a student in his late teens in a classe préparatoire near Paris, fed up with a keyboard that fought him on every É and every quotation mark — started building his own fix. He has carried the project as a volunteer ever since: nine years of daily use, testing and refinement, first alone, and since 2026 through the AMCF, the nonprofit association he chairs.
The bet: keep the AZERTY everyone already knows — same letters, same muscle memory — and fix only what is broken. The result, AZERTY Global, preserves 99% of your keystrokes while finally making proper French (and 200+ other languages) easy to type. The final version was released to the public on June 15, 2026, free and open source.
In his words
"I was a student taking notes all day, and my own keyboard kept getting in the way — no É, no proper French quotation marks, even the period hidden behind Shift. Plenty of people had tried to fix the AZERTY before me, but almost always by piling extra characters onto it — never by also fixing its everyday flaws: the period, the @, the programming symbols, the acute and grave accents. So I set out to do both. Nine years later, I'm still at it."
— Antoine Olivier, creator of AZERTY Global
About Antoine Olivier
Antoine Olivier, now in his twenties, started AZERTY Global in 2017 as a student in a French classe préparatoire. He is the creator of AZERTY Global and the president of the AMCF (Association pour la Modernisation du Clavier Français), the nonprofit that maintains and distributes the layout. He has worked on the project as a volunteer for nine years. Based in Clermont-Ferrand, France. Interviews in English or French.
Timeline
- January 2016 — A report commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture states that proper French cannot be typed on the AZERTY keyboard.
- 2017 — Antoine Olivier, then a student, starts designing AZERTY Global.
- 2019 — AFNOR publishes the official NF Z71-300 standard; its adoption remains marginal.
- March 2026 — The AMCF, a French nonprofit association, is founded to maintain and distribute the project.
- June 15, 2026 — AZERTY Global is released as a final version: free, open source (EUPL 1.2), for Windows (including a Microsoft Store app), macOS and Linux.
The French keyboard problem, in 30 seconds
French grammar requires accented capitals (É, È, À, Ç), the œ ligature (cœur, œuvre) and the quotation marks « ». Yet on the AZERTY layout shipped with every computer in France since 1984, none of these can be typed directly — most French people work around their own keyboard every day with number codes, copy-pasting or spelling mistakes.
AZERTY Global fixes this with only 5 improvements: type É, È, À, Ç directly with Caps Lock, use « » and œ, and reach the programming symbols { } [ ] easily — while 99% of your keystrokes stay untouched. No new hardware, no relearning, no cost.
How the French cope today
Forty years of daily workarounds — each one a scene for your story.
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Alt codes
Hold Alt, type 0201 on the numeric keypad, release: É. This is the method documented by Microsoft's support pages and regularly taught by the French press — and it is impossible on most laptops, which have no numeric keypad.
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Googling in your native language
Queries about typing a capital É alone (« é majuscule ») draw more than 130,000 Google searches every month in France, according to Semrush and Ahrefs — people searching the web to copy-paste letters of their own alphabet.
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Autocorrect
Word silently fixes some of it (Ecole → École). Browsers, email clients, chat apps and forms don't — so the fix disappears exactly where most typing happens today.
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Power-user utilities
The tech-savvy install third-party tools such as WinCompose to compose characters key by key — a fine workaround, for the few who know it exists.
AZERTY Global replaces all of these with simple keystrokes, directly on the keyboard — that's the story.
Story angles
Four ready-to-use angles for covering AZERTY Global — we can provide facts, demos and interviews for each.
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One person, nine years
A student in his late teens starts fixing the national keyboard in 2017 and never stops: nine years of volunteer work, now carried by a nonprofit he chairs.
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The official standard and the pragmatic bet
France published an official standard in 2019, but its adoption remains marginal. AZERTY Global makes the opposite bet: change almost nothing, fix what matters.
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Bigger than France
Downloads from 80+ countries, strong uptake in French-speaking Africa, support for 200+ languages — and English speakers in France finally typing French properly.
The 5 improvements
The letters stay where they are: AZERTY Global mainly fixes the access the French keyboard was missing.
Smart Caps Lock
Accented capitals in one press: É, È, Ç, À without any shortcut.
Direct period
The period and the semicolon are swapped, in favor of the most used character.
Accessible at sign and hashtag
On the top-left key: @ for emails, # with Shift.
Accessible developer symbols
Access to { } \ | [ ] with AltGr on D F G H J K, from the home row.
Accents on the ù key
Acute ´ and grave ` accents together, to type many more languages easily.
Key figures
1,500+
Cumulative downloads since April 2026 (Store, Windows, macOS, Linux)
99%
Of keystrokes preserved
3
Platforms (Windows, macOS, Linux)
1000+
Unicode characters
200+
Languages covered
EUPL 1.2
Free and open source
Detailed download statistics per channel (Microsoft Partner Center, SourceForge, website) available on request.
About the AMCF
The AMCF — Association pour la Modernisation du Clavier Français (Association for the Modernization of the French Keyboard) — is a French nonprofit association created in March 2026.
- Mission: design, maintain and freely distribute open keyboard layouts for French
- Identifiers: RNA W632015664, SIREN 104121082
- Presidency: Antoine Olivier, president of the AMCF
- Project: the AMCF maintains AZERTY Global, a free and open-source layout distributed under the EUPL 1.2 license
They made the switch
Press kit
A complete package for preparing a story on AZERTY Global.
AZERTY Global 2026 press kit
The official ZIP gathers the documents, visuals and videos useful for covering the final version of AZERTY Global after 9 years of development. Press release and project sheet in English — and we are happy to answer any question in English or French.
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Documents
Press release and project sheet in English, ready to hand to a newsroom.
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Visuals
AZERTY Global and AMCF logos, simplified and complete keyboard maps, application screenshot.
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MP4 videos
Short demos: French typography, foreign languages, programming and everyday use.
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Useful notes
README files, self-explanatory file names and assets ready for publication.
Ready-to-use quote
“AZERTY Global improves the French AZERTY without reinventing it: your habits stay, but accented capitals, French typography and international characters become easily accessible.”