Designing an IPA keyboard for the iPad

mattt.me

Does the iPad SDK actually afford new input methods? That would be a very welcome change. I would very much like to make an iambic morse-code input method. Good for input without looking.

It's for your own apps only, but SDK 3.2 added custom input views:

http://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKi...

(from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1283657)

Given that IPA is a construct, and thus has a clear mapping between a sound and its character representation, speech-to-text input would actually be a great way to input IPA.

It would, until you have to pronounce a sound you have trouble making.

I'm not a linguist.

How often does that happen?

Does it happen sufficiently often enough that finding the right sound(s) on a full IPA chart (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:IPA_chart_2005_png.svg) and using that as the larger 'keyboard' is too cumbersome?

Depends on who's doing the pronouncing, I suppose, but certainly linguists are not competent in all languages.

Two obvious examples occur to me. The first is the clicking sound in some African languages. Another is a speaker accustomed to a limited set of vowels trying to input vowel sounds he can't replicate well.

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