If you’re a good typist, a touch typist, you intuitively know which keys you’re hitting and you can focus on the screen. You can then see autocorrect suggestions as they come up, whether they’re spelling mistakes or typos, and choose to accept or reject them on the fly.
If you’re not a touch typist, you have your eyes focused on the keyboard as anything between 2 and 7 fingers flash across the keys in a blur of crossovers and other inefficiencies.
Autocorrect only works if you’re a proper typist who looks at the screen while you type. Most of our generation look at the keyboard as we type, and then it’s too late. We look up and our typed line is a mess of autocorrections we didn’t want that the system inserted by default as we typed on. So we go back and recorrect them, which is a huge time-suck.
I wonder what percentage of people touch type compared with those who are fixated on the keyboard? It’s pretty important to the usefulness of autocorrect on a laptop, where the keyboard and screen are a long way from each other.
Even with a smartphone, where the keyboard and screen are a couple of centimetres apart, I miss autocorrects because I’m looking at the keys.