iPad Web App: Detect Virtual Keyboard Using JavaSc

Question

I'm writing a web app for the iPad (not a regular App Store app - it's written using HTML, CSS and JavaScript). Since the keyboard fills up a huge part of the screen, it would make sense to change the app's layout to fit the remaining space when the keyboard is shown. However, I have found no way to detect when or whether the keyboard is shown.

My first idea was to assume that the keyboard is visible when a text field has focus. However, when an external keyboard is attached to an iPad, the virtual keyboard does not show up when a text field receives focus.

In my experiments, the keyboard also did not affect the height or scrollheight of any of the DOM elements, and I have found no proprietary events or properties which indicate whether the keyboard is visible.

Answer 1

maybe a slightly better solution is to bind (with jQuery in my case) the "blur" event on the various input fields.

This because when the keyboard disappear all form fields are blurred. So for my situation this snipped solved the problem.

$('input, textarea').bind('blur', function(e) {

       // Keyboard disappeared
       window.scrollTo(0, 1);

});

hope it helps. Michele

Answer 2

Well, you can detect when your input boxes have the focus, and you know the height of the keyboard. There is also CSS available to get the orientation of the screen, so I think you can hack it.

You would want to handle the case of a physical keyboard somehow, though.

Answer 3

As noted in the previous answers somewhere the window.innerHeight variable gets updated properly now on iOS10 when the keyboard appears and since I don't need the support for earlier versions I came up with the following hack that might be a bit easier then the discussed "solutions".

//keep track of the "expected" height
var windowExpectedSize = window.innerHeight;

//update expected height on orientation change
window.addEventListener('orientationchange', function(){
    //in case the virtual keyboard is open we close it first by removing focus from the input elements to get the proper "expected" size
    if (window.innerHeight != windowExpectedSize){
        $("input").blur();
        $("div[contentEditable]").blur();     //you might need to add more editables here or you can focus something else and blur it to be sure
        setTimeout(function(){
            windowExpectedSize = window.innerHeight;
        },100);
    }else{
        windowExpectedSize = window.innerHeight;
    }
});

//and update the "expected" height on screen resize - funny thing is that this is still not triggered on iOS when the keyboard appears
window.addEventListener('resize', function(){
    $("input").blur();  //as before you can add more blurs here or focus-blur something
    windowExpectedSize = window.innerHeight;
});

then you can use:

if (window.innerHeight != windowExpectedSize){ ... }

to check if the keyboard is visible. I've been using it for a while now in my web app and it works well, but (as all of the other solutions) you might find a situation where it fails because the "expected" size is not updated properly or something.

Answer 4

If there is an on-screen keyboard, focusing a text field that is near the bottom of the viewport will cause Safari to scroll the text field into view. There might be some way to exploit this phenomenon to detect the presence of the keyboard (having a tiny text field at the bottom of the page which gains focus momentarily, or something like that).

Answer 5

Edit: Documented by Apple although I couldn't actually get it to work: WKWebView Behavior with Keyboard Displays: "In iOS 10, WKWebView objects match Safari’s native behavior by updating their window.innerHeight property when the keyboard is shown, and do not call resize events" (perhaps can use focus or focus plus delay to detect keyboard instead of using resize).

Edit: code presumes onscreen keyboard, not external keyboard. Leaving it because info may be useful to others that only care about onscreen keyboards. Use http://jsbin.com/AbimiQup/4 to view page params.

We test to see if the document.activeElement is an element which shows the keyboard (input type=text, textarea, etc).

The following code fudges things for our purposes (although not generally correct).

function getViewport() {
    if (window.visualViewport && /Android/.test(navigator.userAgent)) {
        // https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/visual-viewport-api    Note on desktop Chrome the viewport subtracts scrollbar widths so is not same as window.innerWidth/innerHeight
        return {
            left: visualViewport.pageLeft,
            top: visualViewport.pageTop,
            width: visualViewport.width,
            height: visualViewport.height
        };
    }
    var viewport = {
            left: window.pageXOffset,   // http://www.quirksmode.org/mobile/tableViewport.html
            top: window.pageYOffset,
            width: window.innerWidth || documentElement.clientWidth,
            height: window.innerHeight || documentElement.clientHeight
    };
    if (/iPod|iPhone|iPad/.test(navigator.platform) && isInput(document.activeElement)) {       // iOS *lies* about viewport size when keyboard is visible. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2593139/ipad-web-app-detect-virtual-keyboard-using-javascript-in-safari Input focus/blur can indicate, also scrollTop: 
        return {
            left: viewport.left,
            top: viewport.top,
            width: viewport.width,
            height: viewport.height * (viewport.height > viewport.width ? 0.66 : 0.45)  // Fudge factor to allow for keyboard on iPad
        };
    }
    return viewport;
}


function isInput(el) {
    var tagName = el && el.tagName && el.tagName.toLowerCase();
    return (tagName == 'input' && el.type != 'button' && el.type != 'radio' && el.type != 'checkbox') || (tagName == 'textarea');
};

The above code is only approximate: It is wrong for split keyboard, undocked keyboard, physical keyboard. As per comment at top, you may be able to do a better job than the given code on Safari (since iOS8?) or WKWebView (since iOS10) using window.innerHeight property.

I have found failures under other circumstances: e.g. give focus to input then go to home screen then come back to page; iPad shouldnt make viewport smaller; old IE browsers won't work, Opera didnt work because Opera kept focus on element after keyboard closed.

However the tagged answer (changing scrolltop to measure height) has nasty UI side effects if viewport zoomable (or force-zoom enabled in preferences). I don't use the other suggested solution (changing scrolltop) because on iOS, when viewport is zoomable and scrolling to focused input, there are buggy interactions between scrolling & zoom & focus (that can leave a just focused input outside of viewport - not visible).

Answer 6

The problem is that, even in 2014, devices handle screen resize events, as well as scroll events, inconsistently while the soft keyboard is open.

I've found that, even if you're using a bluetooth keyboard, iOS in particular triggers some strange layout bugs; so instead of detecting a soft keyboard, I've just had to target devices that are very narrow and have touchscreens.

I use media queries (or window.matchMedia) for width detection and Modernizr for touch event detection.