The Yorùbá alphabet does not make use of certain latin characters (e.g. z, x, c, v, q). Our online keyboard inserts yoruba symbols when these unused latin keys are pressed as follows:  

To generate symbols with diacritics you press the base latin alphabet followed by the diacritic using one of the following latin alphabets on the keyboard - v, x, or z. For example:

Dead Keys - Dead keys are so named because when pressed on the keyboard no character immediately appears on the screen. Instead the next key pressed on the keyboard is modified so that that what appears on the screen is a result of the current key pressed and the previous dead key pressed. For instance, if the apostrophe on the regular english keyboard was considered into a dead key, then any letter pressed after the apostrophe dead key is pressed results in that letter with the acute diacritic on it. Dead keys is one way to generate the diacritics in the Yorùbá alphabet. The US-international keyboard layout uses the AltGr (i.e the alt key on the right side of the space bar) as a dead key trigger i.e. to turn certain keys into dead keys representing certain diacritics.

Input Method (or IME - Input Method Editor) - Certain very popular languages (Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc) have characters and symbols that aren't found on a traditional latin keyboard. Modern Operating Systems (including mobile phone OSs) have software components that allow you to compose these unique characters using a combination of the keys/alphabets found on a regular keyboard. These software components/applications are known as Input Method. Various input methods exist for various languages. Technically, a software that allows use of dead keys is an example of an input method implementation.

Our online keyboard is an example of an easy to use "input method" for the Yorùbá language. One of the reasons for this is that it is an input method designed specifically for the Yorùbá character/symbol/alphabet set. This design puts the letters used to enter the diacritics closer together than the apostrophe and tilde keys that are normally used in the US-international keyboard layout. The replacement of unused latin keys with letters from the Yorùbá alphabet helps to achieve this while still leaving the apostrophe and tilde available for their normal use. This design also gives easy access to latin alphabets that aren't used in the Yorùbá alphabet by using the ESC, Ctrl or the Alt key as a kind of reverse dead-letter to type the otherwise replaced latin alphabets.