How to Improve Typing Accuracy: What 168,960 Typists Show

To type more accurately, ease off your speed until your runs are clean, fix mistakes as you notice them, work on the specific keys you keep missing, and keep your eyes on the text. Accuracy and speed also tend to rise together: in a study of 168,960 typists, the faster typists were the ones who made fewer mistakes. Chasing speed at the cost of accuracy is not how they got there.

This guide explains what accuracy numbers actually measure, how typical mistakes are, what the research says about errors, and how to improve using the free tools on this site. Figures come from the CHI 2018 paper Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes (Dhakal, Feit, Kristensson and Oulasvirta), and we say clearly when something is our own suggestion.

Two kinds of accuracy

People use the word "accuracy" for two different things, and it helps to know which one you are looking at.

• Final accuracy is how many characters in the finished text are correct. This is what the FreeTyper speed test, lessons and practice report: correct characters divided by all characters typed. When you press Backspace, the character you step back over is removed from the tally, so a mistake you fix stops counting as an error. You pay for it in time instead.
• Keystroke-level accuracy counts every slip, including the ones you corrected. The study measures this as keystrokes per character: the average was 1.173, meaning typists pressed about 17% more keys than the text contained, because of corrections.

Final accuracy tells you how clean your result is. The extra keystrokes tell you how much effort you spent getting there. A typist can finish with perfect final accuracy and still be slow because of constant corrections.

How typical is 95% accuracy?

In the study, the average uncorrected error rate was 1.167% of the transcribed text (standard deviation 1.43%), and 90% of participants left under 2.66% errors. Put roughly in our terms, most volunteers finished with around 97% to 99% final accuracy.

So FreeTyper's coach, which tells you to hold accuracy below 95% and calls a run below 88% not a real score, is asking for a modest floor, not a perfectionist one. A run around 95% would sit among the less accurate tenth of that group. Two cautions apply: the volunteers were self-selected typing-test takers copying short sentences, and the study's error measure is not identical to ours, so treat the comparison as rough.

What the research says about errors

• Fewer mistakes go with higher speed. Across participants, WPM was negatively correlated with uncorrected errors (r = −0.21), with error corrections (r = −0.36) and with keystrokes per character (r = −0.4). From about 30 WPM upward, the faster the typist, the fewer keystrokes per character they used, meaning they both made and corrected fewer mistakes.
• Correcting is expensive. The authors note that besides pressing extra keys, correcting an error means finding it in the text you have typed.
• Slower typists leave more errors in the text. The authors suggest this could mean they are less able to notice their own mistakes.
• Wrong letters were the most common error type. Substituting one letter for another was more frequent than leaving a letter out or adding an extra one, which differs from some earlier studies. Substitution and omission errors fell as speed rose, while insertion errors changed little.
• Substitutions were far more common among slow typists. The authors suggest this may come from being less consistent and having a weaker mental picture of where the fingers are.
• Typing training helped only slightly. Trained typists left slightly fewer errors uncorrected (1.02% against 1.23%) and corrected slightly less often (5.9% against 6.5%). The authors describe the difference as small.

How to improve your accuracy

Steps 1 to 5 are our suggestions, informed by the findings above rather than proven by them.

1. Slow down until your runs are clean. Ease off your speed until you can finish several runs at 95% or better, then add speed back in small steps.
2. Make your finger-to-key mapping consistent. Because wrong-letter errors seem linked to uncertain finger positions, use one finger for each key every time. The keyboard guide shows the standard map, and the lessons teach it row by row.
3. Keep your eyes on the text. Looking down to check the keys breaks your rhythm and your place in the text.
4. Fix the keys you actually miss. FreeTyper counts your errors per key. Look at the heatmap and weakest-keys list on the progress page, then use the weak-key drill in typing practice.
5. Stop when you are tired. If accuracy drops sharply during a session, stop and come back later.
6. Notice and fix mistakes as you go. The study shows most people correct most of their mistakes, and that leaving more of them in the text is a trait of slower typists. Fixing costs time, so the long-term aim is to make fewer of them in the first place.

How to track your accuracy on FreeTyper

• Every result shows accuracy next to WPM. The coach note reacts to it: below 95% it suggests holding accuracy, and below 88% it calls the run not a real score.
• The progress page shows your average accuracy over your last 30 sessions and a keyboard heatmap coloured by error rate: green for 5% or less, then gold above 5%, orange above 10% and red above 15%.
• For a trustworthy figure, average several runs of the same length and type, as described in the typing speed test guide.

If accuracy will not improve

Persistent errors on the same keys can have a simple cause, such as an unfamiliar keyboard layout, a worn or cramped keyboard, or an awkward desk setup. Check your setup using our posture and wrist pain guide, and if typing is painful or you have numbness or tingling, see a doctor. For the bigger picture on speed, see how to type faster and what is a good typing speed.

Sources

• Dhakal V, Feit AM, Kristensson PO, Oulasvirta A. Observations on Typing from 136 Million Keystrokes. CHI 2018. Error rates, correction rates, keystrokes per character, correlations and the authors' interpretations are taken from the paper's results.
• How FreeTyper calculates accuracy, the coach thresholds and the heatmap colours: see the guides to the speed test and the progress tracker. The six-step routine and the 95% floor are our own suggestions.

Written by Ashiqur Rahman. Figures attributed to a source were checked against that source. If you spot something wrong, tell me and I will correct it.