Velotype is the old trademark for a type of keyboard for typing text known as a syllabic chord keyboard

Chorded keyboard

A keyset or chorded keyboard is a computer input device that allows the user to enter characters or commands formed by pressing several keys together, like playing a "chord" on a piano...

, an invention of the Dutchmen Nico Berkelmans and Marius den Outer. The current tradename is Veyboard. Veyboard is a Dutch

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

 company.

Contrary to traditional QWERTY

QWERTY

QWERTY is the most common modern-day keyboard layout. The name comes from the first six letters appearing in the topleft letter row of the keyboard, read left to right: Q-W-E-R-T-Y. The QWERTY design is based on a layout created for the Sholes and Glidden typewriter and sold to Remington in the...

 type keyboards, on which a typist usually presses one key at a time to create one character at a time, a Veyboard requires the user to press several keys simultaneously, producing syllable

Syllable

A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds. For example, the word water is composed of two syllables: wa and ter. A syllable is typically made up of a syllable nucleus with optional initial and final margins .Syllables are often considered the phonological "building...

s rather than letter

Letter (alphabet)

A letter is a grapheme in an alphabetic system of writing, such as the Greek alphabet and its descendants. Letters compose phonemes and each phoneme represents a phone in the spoken form of the language....

s.

A practiced “veyboarder” can produce more text than on a traditional keyboard, as much as 200 words per minute, double the rate of a fast traditional typist. Because of this, Veyboards are often used for live applications, such as subtitling

Subtitle (captioning)

Subtitles are textual versions of the dialog in films and television programs, usually displayed at the bottom of the screen. They can either be a form of written translation of a dialog in a foreign language, or a written rendering of the dialog in the same language, with or without added...

 for television and for the hearing impaired.

The keyboard is an orthographic chord keyboard, very different from chorded phonetic keyboards used for verbatim transcription, like the Stenotype

Stenotype

A stenotype, stenotype machine or shorthand machine is a specialized chorded keyboard or typewriter used by stenographers for shorthand use...

. Chorded phonetic keyboards, such as those manufactured by Stenograph, produce an intermediate shorthand

Shorthand

Shorthand is an abbreviated symbolic writing method that increases speed or brevity of writing as compared to a normal method of writing a language. The process of writing in shorthand is called stenography, from the Greek stenos and graphē or graphie...

format in which a combination of phonetics- and spelling-based strokes are translated by software to produce the output. Orthographic keyboards, on the other hand, allow the operator to rely on more traditional spelling in shaping the output, hence the term “orthographic” as opposed to “phonetic”. Stenographic keyboards are generally more difficult to learn than the Veyboard, but trained Stenotype operators can go faster, even upwards of 300 words per minute.