Disabling built-in soft keyboard

[clivenwe7com]

We have an HTML5/JavaScript/CSS application, which works as expected on several platforms. However on a number of Smart TVs, including, but not solely, Toshiba, seem to pop up the in-built on-screen keyboard. Is there a simple or recommended approach to disabling this soft keyboard.

Our application displays its own to maintain a consistent UX across all our supported platforms.

Many thanks in advance.

Clive

[Support_STA]

Some manufacturers have built-in keyboards that pop up when the remote control OK button (key constant: VK_ENTER) is pressed while the focus is on an <input> element. You can try to stop the event this action fires in order to prevent the built-in keyboard to show up.

However, in general it is recommended to leave the choice to the user which keyboard they want to use: built-in keyboard or on-screen keyboard. For the built-in keyboard, you don't have to do anything except using an <input> field for text input, it's quite handy. Furthermore, for STA QA validation it is essential to have an on-screen keyboard for text input for devices that do not have built-in keyboards.

Regards,
STA QA

[clivenwe7com]

Many thanks for the answer.

In the current version of the app, we don't wish to have the built-in keyboard popping up, although I can see the advantages of this longer term. If the keyboard was skin-able then this would be the preferred route, but this doesn't seem to be an option right now at least not on Toshibas.

We considered changing <input> to say <div>, but there were a number of features lost this way, eg the caret, text scrolling.

So our approach was to prevent the focus event from firing, which seems to work well, with minimal loss of functionality.

Thank you again for the suggestions.

Clive