Mitigation for Keyman, Windows 10 1803, and Amharic, Tigrinya and Sinhala issue

Background

It recently came to our attention that under Windows 10 1803 and Windows 10 1809, Keyman keyboards simply do not work when associated with Amharic or Sinhala languages, and sometimes do not work with Tigrinya. We have done a careful investigation and believe the issue to be within Windows code, and are working with Microsoft to get this issue resolved in a future update of Windows 10. However, we also believe that is insufficient as you can’t wait around for this, so we have built an update to Keyman 10 and 11 which works around the problem.

The update for Keyman 10 (latest stable version) and 11 (in alpha release) is included in Keyman 10.0.1205.0 and the latest Keyman 11 alpha releases, and detects when you attempt to install a keyboard layout under the Amharic, Tigrinya or Sinhala languages, and installs the keyboard layout instead under Geez (for Amharic / Tigrinya) or English (US) (for Sinhala). Using an incorrect language association is not ideal, but the keyboards do then at least work!

Please visit the page How to send feedback to Microsoft for issues that impact Keyman to learn how to provide feedback to Microsoft on this issue.

The following instructions are for users on Keyman 10. If you are working with the Keyman 11 alpha release, please visit the prerelease website to get the latest updates.

Automatic resolution

If you are experiencing this issue, then follow these steps:

1. Uninstall the existing Keyman Desktop version (in Windows Settings/Programs)
2. Restart Windows
3. Download and install the latest stable release, either with or without your language keyboard bundled, and install keyboards as required.

Manual resolution

To work around this issue yourself, open Keyman Configuration, expand the keyboard layout that is not working and click the (X) button next to the relevant language in the list of Languages for the keyboard. Then add the language “gez-Ethi-ET” for Amharic or Tigrinya keyboards, or “English” for a Sinhala keyboard. You may of course choose other languages but these options have been tested by us and confirmed to work.

You can read these instructions in more detail on the community forum.

References

1. Original report on Keyman forums
2. Keyman tracking issue
3. How to send feedback to Microsoft