I’m a team member over at FirstVoices, and have gotten a couple of messages from different language communities, saying that with the latest iOS update (13.4.1), their keyboards no longer display special characters when they’re located on a long press.
Specifically, I’ve heard from SENĆOŦEN and Haíɫzaqvḷa speakers. I’m sure that there will likely be more in the coming days.
If anyone has an idea of what has happened, and how this could be resolved, I would appreciate it. It’s not an issue of the keyboard itself having been changed, so I figure it must be an iOS update issue.
Yes this appears to be a bug in iOS 13.4 which we have flagged with Apple. We have built a workaround in the Keyman app for it which was released in Keyman 13.0.106. I note that the FirstVoices app is still in version 12.0 (as the updated version has not yet been tested and approved by your team). I am preparing a 14.0 test release of the FirstVoices app so you can validate it, and we’ll then go back and release a 13.0.107 update for FirstVoices app as soon as that is all good.
In the meantime, for those users who are stuck on iOS 13.4.1, a workaround is to install Keyman, and their corresponding FV keyboard from the download catalog – it’s a bit of a bigger search and the language names may not correspond exactly given the names on the Keyman catalog are based on the ISO639-3 language names. For example, ‘Straits Salish (Latin)’ corresponds to SENĆOŦEN and ‘Heiltsuk (Latin)’ corresponds to Haíɫzaqvḷa.
Side note: I see that the fv_heiltsuk keyboard uses the name ‘Haiɫzaqvla’ rather than ‘Haíɫzaqvḷa’ – diacritic differences only, but fools the keyboard search at present!
Hey Marc, thanks for the update and the explanation. Just to confirm: Is there an updated version (13.0?) that I could do testing for now? Or am I waiting for your new 14.0 test release? I’d like to push this out as quickly as possible, so please let me know what can be done on my end and an expected timeline that we’re looking at.
As for the discrepancy in names, thanks for letting me know. I’ll keep this in mind as we suggest the workaround.
(If you’d like to move this conversation into email, let me know! Thanks so much Marc!)
Yes, there’s some internal FV/Keyman stuff that’s probably better discussed over email. So taking conversation there for now.
For others reading: we are working on getting the 14.0 test build available and then will back-port any changes to 13.0 for release as soon as possible.