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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
[email protected]📖 The 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 non-profit 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 typing habits 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 non-profit 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 non-profit 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 typing habits 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 your own language
Queries about typing a capital É alone (« é majuscule ») represent some 150,000 Google searches every month in France — 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 non-profit 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+ Latin-alphabet 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
1,000+
Cumulative downloads since April 2026 (Store, Windows, macOS, Linux)
99%
Of typing habits 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 non-profit association created in March 2026.
- Mission: design, maintain and freely distribute open keyboard layouts for French and Latin-alphabet languages
- 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.”