1119424 - Add Xhosa Keyboard layout

Status: RESOLVED INVALID

(Firefox OS Graveyard :: Gaia::Keyboard, defect)

Description

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - Use needinfo]]

We're going to need a specific keyboard layout for Xhosa. 
Maybe Friedel can give some input about the needed layout and can help keyboard team on this?
thanks!

Comment 1

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - Use needinfo]]

[Blocking Requested - why for this release]:
As per our call with Bus Dev, Rel Man and l10n team this morning, it is confirmed that this is needed on 2.0 (and onwards). Thus renominating for 2.0 work

Comment 2

[Friedel Wolff]

Simple answer: I believe the standard English layout is sufficient for Xhosa, just as with Zulu and Swahili, but other opinions might be useful.

Longer answer:
One aspect of the UX is concerning me here (the same applies for Zulu, Swahili or any other language without its own layout):

If the user switches on for the first time, selects Xhosa, gets the UI in Xhosa and the English layout,  they seem to automatically get English predictive text along with the English layout. This can be quite frustrating, especially since the global configuration for prediction/correction might not be appropriate (the user wants to switch between English and Xhosa, depending on message recipient, etc.) The user is then bombarded with incorrect suggestions when typing Xhosa.

My intuition is that few people will know to look through the settings, but even if they do, it is not ideal, as they will then forego typing assistance when typing in English.

Can somebody from UX maybe comment on this? Should we maybe have a layout just for the sake of being able to easily switch between the two "languages" (with and without predictions/corrections)?  Loosing the comma (,) is a bit of a price to pay, so it is a hard trade-off.

The only other consideration is the missing apostrophe - this came up in my user testing today for Afrikaans. Since these languages won't have a dictionary, they might be frustrated by the apostrophe not being easily accessible. I'll have to look at some corpora to look at frequencies to judge the impact of this one.

Kevin, maybe you can help on this one, as I don't have a reasonable size+quality corpus for Zulu or Xhosa handy.

Comment 3

[Dwayne Bailey]

Confirming Friedel's comment, no specific Xhosa layout needed. South Africa uses en-US on keyboards.  Echo his sentiment on the issue of switching language when inputting.

Comment 4

[Delphine Lebédel [:delphine - Use needinfo]]

Therefore marking as resolved invalid. Re-open if deemed necessary.
Thanks!