Hi Marcus,
I wonder what would be better:
- a virtual keyboard (click keys on an image) where only the international characters are displayed,
- a complete 61-key virtual keyboard (click keys on an image),
- change the actual keyboard keys,
- both 2. and 3. combined.
What do you and other people think?
I think option 1 might do the trick for languages where there are not a lot of international characters, e.g. German. But for languages where there are a lot of international characters, for example Greek
or Russian, options 2, 3 or 4 seem more appropriate to me. (Note that by international characters I mean characters that differ from those of the US English keyboard.)
The keyboard could be integrated in a "block" plugin. Teachers would only have to display this block in their quiz. Since the answer boxes in Cloze, Short Answer and probably most other question types are "input" elements, the keyboard block plugin would
work with all of these question types. It could even be adjusted to other question types if their answer boxes use elements other than "input".
I think I read that "block" plugins are relatively easy to write. I might be able to give it a try this summer.
My mother tongue is French and I have spoken French at home and at work most of my life. So I'm used to the accented characters and other difficulties of this language, but I can understand that this is somewhat scary for someone who is not used to it. Although a bit laborious, it is nevertheless not that complicated. 
There is a multilingual Virtual Keyboard plugin ↗, but it only works with the TinyMCE editor. An international keyboard "block" plugin could work with TinyMCE and Atto editors, for example in Essay questions, as well as when there is no editor for example in Cloze and Short answer questions.
