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My webpage is a form with many text boxes. I have created my own popup keyboard which is much smaller than the iPad one thereby saving a lot of screen real estate, especially in Landscape mode. My problem is that when I select a text box for entry the iPad keyboard appears.

Is there anyway through JavaScript to hide and disable the iPad keyboard.

Thanks,

user984749
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  • Have you tried http://stackoverflow.com/a/7761438/327466? – KatieK Aug 08 '13 at 02:13
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    set the input field to `readonly="true"`, you can still fire a click event on it to open up your virtual keyboard. – nyzm Aug 08 '13 at 02:19
  • I checked the above link but there they want to hide the keyboard when moving from a text box entry to a drop down menu. I need to be able to enter data into my text boxes (via my own keyboard) and not have the iPad keyboard appear, i.e. I can't make the text boxes read only. – user984749 Aug 08 '13 at 04:16
  • Have you found a solution? I have the exact same problem. – Nazerke Jun 20 '14 at 05:06

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Not to put your idea down in any way, honest. It's bad practice generally to try and 'supplant' the user's device for several reasons.

They might have a special keyboard tailored the way they want.

Their device might be in chinese, japanese, etc.

It's better to let the device itself handle this. In most devices there is absolutely no way to disable the default keyboard.

Problems I can see, besides the above ones are, what happens in devices that are 'mobile' but have a physical keyboard? Like the windows tablets. Do you account for different languages? All of them? Do you provide a way to switch between them? Can you set a default language so user's don't ALWAYS have to switch?

I'd suggest not using your own popup keyboard. Let the device handle it.

Also, check out UX Stackexchange and ask for some input there. They'll have better suggestions.

Community
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Jerry Saravia
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  • The form is for use by specific employees only so there won't be any language issues. – user984749 Aug 08 '13 at 04:24
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    I've tried using 'document.activeElement.blur();' as suggested in the above link but that stops me entering anything in the textboxes on the iPad. – user984749 Aug 08 '13 at 04:30
  • Are the 'keys' in your keyboard special? As in some special symbol only used internally by employees? If so, then I was hasty to deter you. But if it's just a regular old qwerty keyboard I would say don't bother. It'll not be helpful and users will then get annoyed when they WANT to use the device's keyboard and you won't allow it to come up. – Jerry Saravia Aug 08 '13 at 04:38
  • No, they're not special but we only need numbers and letters. I actually have two popup keyboards, one for letters and one for numbers. So they are quite small and don't take up much screen space. I'm quite surprised that Apple didn't put the option in the iPad to disable the pop up keyboard. Especially as it's automatically disabled when an external keyboard is connected. It would be nice if I could access that functionality through JavaScript. – user984749 Aug 08 '13 at 05:34
  • i'm surprised as well actually about the keyboard. But then again, apple wants to control pretty much everything on their platform so allowing someone to 'ruin' the experience, ruin in the sense of something apple isn't aware of, wouldn't agree with their view of how things should be. – Jerry Saravia Aug 08 '13 at 15:09
  • There's a function called resignFirstResponder that appears to be used by Apple app developers. It seems this function dismisses the keyboard. Does anyone know if it's possible to call functions like this with JavaScript? – user984749 Aug 10 '13 at 05:32