I’ve spoken to a great many conlangers about all things language-related, and it seems a major headache for most of them – myself included – is this lovely little thing commonly known as the IPA.

As wonderful and useful as it may be, it relies a lot on obscure characters hiding in a corner somewhere in Unicode. Most people cannot input these characters with their regular keyboard layout, and in many cases, one has to resort to a game of hide-and-seek with charmap. Even worse, still, is when IPA characters are needed on a website which may not use a sensible Unicode encoding for its text, and you have to use HTML entities instead – ː and so on.

As a solution – hopefully – to these issues, I present a very simple little thing I spent a little while implementing:

My IPA Helper.

This thing should make it at least a little bit easier to input IPA characters for those of you who aren’t using a custom keyboard layout. Simply click on an IPA character or symbol in any one of the tables, and it’ll be added to the plain-text and HTML text boxes.

If there is anything missing or if something appears broken in your browser, please let me know either by commenting below, or by using the contact form on my new and unfinished website prototype (which has numerous dead links).

I hope this might be of use to some of you out there; it’s already proven useful to me!

The IPA Helper is distributed under the Creative Commons Non-Commercial licence, which means you can do whatever you want with it as long as you don’t try to sell it. Everything needed for the IPA Helper to work is contained within that one file; feel free to save it and use it locally. Also note that you’ll need a Unicode-compatible browser with IPA fonts installed to actually see the IPA.