Millisecond Forums

Hi Malte,
The response bar should only appear for scripts that use keyboard input when they are run on touchscreen devices that do not have a keyboard. Are you seeing the bar in other circumstances?
-Sean

This is exactly the circumstance in which it appears. How can I disable this. Our lab subjects as well as our web participants are highly confused by this. Plus, we have scripts that rely on the complete height of the screen being available. How can we disable the response bar?

Kind regards, Malte

Hi Malte,
I think of a few different approaches
1) Plug a keyboard into the device so the response bar isn't required
2) Adjust your scripts to use mouse input (which will translate to touch on a touchscreen) so that the response bar isn't required
3) Adjust your scripts to instruct participants to use the response bar instead of the keyboard when no keyboard is present so that they aren't confused.

-Sean 

Hi Sean, thanks a lot for your detailed response, very much appreciated.

The bullet point I don't fully comprehend is no. 1. The scripts are run on regular desktop PCs or notebooks with either a functional keyboard attached or - in case of notebooks - a built-in keyboard. Do I understand correctly that point no. 1 assumes that we have no keyboard attached? If so, this is not the case.

The devices we tested on were devices where either a touch-enabled monitor was connected or convertible notebooks (Yoga 3, Yoga 900s, and HP Spectre 360). Although those devices have touch functionality we always require the keyboard as the primary input device. Could it be that Inquisit brings up the response bar whenever touch capability is detected, regardless of whether a keyboard is attached or not? If so, I would consider this a bug.

To maintain backwards compatibility, I'd assume Inquisit to behave as follows:

1. If the device is touch-enabled and has a physical keyboard: do not show the response bar by default but provide an in-script option to always turn it on.
2. If the device is touch-enabled but has no physical keyboard: always show the response bar
3. If the device only has a physical keyboard: do not show the response bar by default but provide an in-script option to always turn it on.
4. If the device neither is touch-enabled nor has a physical keyboard: always show the response bar and automatically enable mouse input

Hi Malte,
Ok, if your computer does in fact have a keyboard attached, then the response bar should NOT appear. Is it possible the keyboard is somehow temporarily disabled on those devices when you launch the experiment (I'm not familiar with those devices so I don't know if it's possible to turn the keyboard on/off)? If not, then it appears Inquisit has a bug in determining whether a keyboard is present. We'll investigate ASAP, thanks for reporting this.
-Sean

Dear Sean, thanks so much for responding. The keyboard is definitely not disabled. Regular keyboard entries are possible without any problem. Inquisit will register keypresses on the hardware keyboard or an attached USB keyboard immediately and correctly. This seems to be a bug.

Since you do not have one of the devices we tested with lying around, is there anything I could do to help?

Kind regards
  Malte

Hi Malte,
Thanks for your offer to help. If we can't reproduce the problem here, it might be helpful if we could remotely access one of the machines for troubleshooting. In any case, we'll try on our local machines first and let you know if we get stuck. 
Thanks,
Sean

As a temporary fix / workaround, disabling the touch-screen in the Windows device manager ( http://www.thewindowsclub.com/disable-touch-screen-windows-10 ) should prevent the response bar from ever showing up on those hybrid devices. Obviously this is only practical for systems under your direct control (lab devices, not participant's own / home devices), so I'm not sure how useful this is even on a temporary basis. I wanted to throw it out there nonetheless just in case.

Hi Malte, I've emailed you a link to an Inquisit build that should fix this problem. It would be great if you could test it out to confirm.

Thanks,
Sean