Input

Why Keyboard Keys Can Type the Wrong Characters

You press a key marked with one character, but a different character appears on screen. Perhaps @ and " seem to have swapped places, punctuation has moved, or familiar letter keys no longer produce the letters you expect. It can look like a faulty keyboard, but the hardware is often working exactly as intended. The missing piece is the keyboard layout. A keyboard sends information about which key was pressed; software then interprets that key according to the active layout. If the software layout does not match the physical labels on the keyboard, the result on screen can differ from what is printed on the keycap.