Most countries use the Qwerty keyboard layout, named for the first six letters of the keyboard’s upper row.

“Depending on what operating system you are using and on the manufacturer of the keyboard, some keys are not available in the same place, or are not available at all,” the report said, using the “at” sign, or @, and the euro currency sign, or €, as examples. “It is often impossible or very difficult to type certain characters that are very common in the French language with our ‘French’ keyboards.”

The Azerty keyboard does have dedicated keys for commonly used accented letters like é or è. But typing other characters like the cedilla (ç), or ligatures (like in cœur, French for heart, or Lætitia, the name) can require complex keyboard shortcuts that are hard to master. Accenting capital letters (État) can be so complicated that some have even been led to believe — incorrectly — that it is not necessary, the report lamented.

The ministry has asked France’s national standardization body, known as Afnor, to come up with a norm for French keyboards. The norm would not be mandatory, but would give manufacturers, software developers and others a common reference point, and could be used as a condition in government procurement.

Philippe Magnabosco, who heads the keyboard project at Afnor, said that French spelling and grammar were not too complicated for computer keyboards, and there was no reason France could not do better than some of its European neighbors or French-speaking partners, like Canada or Belgium, which have developed keyboard norms that are better suited to typing in French.