iPad Web App: Detect Virtual Keyboard Using JavaScript in Safari?

I found a solution which works, although it is a bit ugly. It also won't work in every situation, but it works for me. Since I'm adapting the size of the user interface to the iPad's window size, the user is normally unable to scroll. In other words, if I set the window's scrollTop, it will remain at 0.

If, on the other hand, the keyboard is shown, scrolling suddenly works. So I can set scrollTop, immediately test its value, and then reset it. Here's how that might look in code, using jQuery:

$(document).ready(function(){
    $('input').bind('focus',function() {
        $(window).scrollTop(10);
        var keyboard_shown = $(window).scrollTop() > 0;
        $(window).scrollTop(0);

        $('#test').append(keyboard_shown?'keyboard ':'nokeyboard ');
    });
});

Normally, you would expect this to not be visible to the user. Unfortunately, at least when running in the Simulator, the iPad visibly (though quickly) scrolls up and down again. Still, it works, at least in some specific situations.

I've tested this on an iPad, and it seems to work fine.

You can use the focusout event to detect keyboard dismissal. It's like blur, but bubbles. It will fire when the keyboard closes (but also in other cases, of course). In Safari and Chrome the event can only be registered with addEventListener, not with legacy methods. Here is an example I used to restore a Phonegap app after keyboard dismissal.

 document.addEventListener('focusout', function(e) {window.scrollTo(0, 0)});

Without this snippet, the app container stayed in the up-scrolled position until page refresh.

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).

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

During the focus event you can scroll past the document height and magically the window.innerHeight is reduced by the height of the virtual keyboard. Note that the size of the virtual keyboard is different for landscape vs. portrait orientations so you'll need to redetect it when it changes. I would advise against remembering these values as the user could connect/disconnect a bluetooth keyboard at any time.

var element = document.getElementById("element"); // the input field
var focused = false;

var virtualKeyboardHeight = function () {
    var sx = document.body.scrollLeft, sy = document.body.scrollTop;
    var naturalHeight = window.innerHeight;
    window.scrollTo(sx, document.body.scrollHeight);
    var keyboardHeight = naturalHeight - window.innerHeight;
    window.scrollTo(sx, sy);
    return keyboardHeight;
};

element.onfocus = function () {
    focused = true;
    setTimeout(function() { 
        element.value = "keyboardHeight = " + virtualKeyboardHeight() 
    }, 1); // to allow for orientation scrolling
};

window.onresize = function () {
    if (focused) {
        element.value = "keyboardHeight = " + virtualKeyboardHeight();
    }
};

element.onblur = function () {
    focused = false;
};

Note that when the user is using a bluetooth keyboard, the keyboardHeight is 44 which is the height of the [previous][next] toolbar.

There is a tiny bit of flicker when you do this detection, but it doesn't seem possible to avoid it.