My macbook air has swapped keyboards

No keyboard icon is shown on the log in screen.

The letters Q and A are swapped; the letters Z and W are swapped and I had to type a semicolon to get an M.

Of course, I certainly could have made a mistake when typing the password. I didn't think I had but sure, I need to run everything through again. I was wondering if the Shift key would still work as it did for a US keyboard?

I tried typing the 8 hoping for and exclamation point as well as trying the /. Neither worked, so I tried Shift+ with each. Thank didn't work either. Perhaps something different from Shift is used to get the other value with the 8 or /?

Actually, your last suggestion was tried when I had talked to an Apple Care technician a couple of days ago. At that time we had not considered the French keyboard. However, we did that same sequence you listed and found the only keyboard listed was the US one. I had to leave for an appointment after that. I will call back if we can't figure this out here.

I know that the Q and A were swapped, along with the W and Z and about the letter M because I had answered some emails just prior to my computer shutting down. I was having to hunt and peck to do so. The number 8, the slash, the question mark and the exclamation mark were not used in those emails.

As I have said previously a couple of times,

(1) I KNOW what was typed for the Q, A, W, Z because I had answered some emails and had to hunt and peck to find what I needed. This was when I decided to call Apple Care and stopped answering the email, hoping to quickly resolve the issu

(2) I then talked to the Apple Care technician and told him about the swap of the A and Q as well as the W and Z. I knew other keys were typing incorrect symbols, but did not bother to investigate all the possibilities then.

(3) I was already logged in before the problem started and the computer was still logged in when the technician and I tried the system settings and discussed a few other things like the restart into safe mode. I did not have time to try safe mode then because of my appointment. When I returned, I went to answer the rest of my email before I called the technician again. Got a few replies done and discovered where the M was. However, the crashing of my computer soon put a stop to that and I have since spent my time trying to log in.

(4) No, as I said, I cannot see what the key strokes for the 8 and slash may be, because the password is hidden with the symbols srepresented by circles.

Phil0124 I tried it. As the computer booted I did see a tiny keyboard with US in the upper right. It was almost invisible against the background I had, so possibly it was there all along? Could not say. How long to hold the key? I held 2-3 seconds and entered the password. No luck. Still refused to let me in.

Phil0124, thanks for the reply. Answer. I don't know. Didn't try it. The restart seemed to go fine, just cannot log in.

As I understand it, Intel based macbook Airs such as mine, will require a log in even if booting in safe mode. About to give it a try though.