Apple - Is it possible to get the keyboard viewer to show a full keyboard when a bluetooth keyboard is connected?

Apple has a pretty good record on accessibility features, one of which is the onscreen keyboard. I would be surprised if there is not a way to do enable the extended onscreen keyboard, but I'm still researching where this precise bit of how-to knowledge.

In the meantime, here is Apple's official page for accessibility features related to Physical and Motor Skills (which is the category for the Onscreen Keyboard): http://www.apple.com/accessibility/macosx/physical.html It shows the extended version in their screenshot.

This is overkill (both in features and price), but I felt the need to add the application called "the best on-screen keyboard, not just for the Macintosh, but for any platform." I'm too new to have lots of links. but look at atri.misericordia.edu for a review of KeyStrokes.

Here: have a layout editor, so if you can't see the keys you need in Keyboard Viewer, you can switch them in to replace some keys you don't really care about: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ukelele

still doing research, will be adding what I find

I found that if you have an Apple Extended Keyboard, that keyboard is automatically used in the display of the keyboard viewer. I have it plugged into my MacBook, which is usually on a stand. When I switch between keyboards, the built-in keyboard viewer automatically uses the right layout.

So the short (though perhaps expensive) solution to this is to simply plug in an Apple Extended Keyboard if you want to see the whole keyboard in the viewer as well.

Here's a 2 second screencast of the live swapping in action, as I switch between the built-in keyboard and the external one.

This also works with non-Apple extended-format keyboards (tested with Microsoft-brand extended keyboard).