---
title: Creating a Simple Touch keyboard
---

## Introduction and design

If you have experience in designing Keyman keyboards for computers, the
interface for designing mobile keyboards looks very similar, but it
hides the reality of additional steps necessary for mobile keyboards.
This tutorial attempts to walk you through the process.

The [Quick French tutorial](../tutorial/) shows how to create a simple
desktop keyboard for typing accented characters used in French and other
European languages. It is possible to create a touch screen format of
that keyboard, but it is probably unnecessary. The default keyboards for
both Android and iOS devices have a way to type these accented
characters. Press and hold on a vowel, and a popup menu will give you a
choice of accents to put on that letter.

For this tutorial we will demonstrate something usable for the Fulfulde
language cluster spoken across many Sahelian countries of Africa.
Fulfulde is usually written using the Latin alphabet, but there are a
few characters added to the usual list of alphabetical characters. So
this is a useful example for any language wanting to add a few
characters to the standard Latin keyboard. Here are the characters we
are going to add, together with their Unicode values.

|     |          |     |          |     |     |          |     |          |
|-----|----------|-----|----------|-----|-----|----------|-----|----------|
| `ɓ` | `U+0253` | `Ɓ` | `U+0181` |     | `ɗ` | `U+0257` | `Ɗ` | `U+018A` |
| `ŋ` | `U+014B` | `Ŋ` | `U+014A` |     | `ƴ` | `U+01B4` | `Ƴ` | `U+01B3` |

Here we will likely want to proceed differently than with the desktop
keyboard. The usual approach for a desktop keyboard is to create a
deadkey. The keyboards I have used for Fulfulde (going back to decades
ago) used the <kbd>/</kbd> key as the deadkey.
<kbd>/</kbd><kbd>b</kbd> gave ɓ,
<kbd>/</kbd><kbd>d</kbd> gave ɗ, and so on.

It would be possible to use that desktop keyboard logic on touch
screens. But your mobile device users will find these rules annoying.

Instead of two keys they would probably have to press four, since the
standard alphabetical keyboard on most touch devices does not have the
slash key. So they would have to press the key to switch to the numeric
keyboard, then press slash, then press the key to switch back to the
alphabetical keyboard, and then the letter. What touch screen users would
appreciate is something that uses the great feature of touch screens,
the long press or press and hold on a letter, to see analogous letters.

So we’ll set up a touch screen keyboard that lets you
* press and hold ‘d’ to see the two hooked d characters
* press and hold ‘b’ to see the hooked b characters, and so on.

[Next: Making, testing and distributing the touch
keyboard](making-touch-keyboard)

## See also

* Tips for using [gestures](gestures) in Keyman Developer