How to Disable Autocorrect for Your iPad's Bluetooth Keyboard
Jason Fitzpatrick
Editor at Large
Jason Fitzpatrick is the Editor in Chief of LifeSavvy, How-To Geek's sister site focused life hacks, tips, and tricks. He has over a decade of experience in publishing and has authored thousands of articles at Review Geek, How-To Geek, and Lifehacker. Jason served as Lifehacker's Weekend Editor before he joined How-To Geek. Read more...
@jasonfitzpatric
Jan 6, 2017, 4:04 pm EST | 1 min read
The take-for-granted features we enjoy when using an on-screen keyboard—like auto-corrections and auto-capitalization–quickly become a hindrance if you're using a physical keyboard with your iOS device. Let's look at how to quickly turn off those features so your physical keyboard acts the way you expect.
Note: This feature is only available on iOS devices running iOS 10 or above—older versions of iOS use the same settings for both on-screen and physical keyboards, with no ability to differentiate between the two.
RELATED: How to Use a Physical Keyboard With Your iPad or iPhone
When you pair a Bluetooth keyboard with your iOS device, the Bluetooth keyboard, by default, inherits all the features of the on-screen keyboard, including the language, automatic text correction, automatic capitalization of the first word of a sentence, and double tapping the space bar will insert a period. While you're free to leave those features as is, there's a good chance you're used to typing on a traditional keyboard and those on-screen keyboard time savers will now become time wasters.
Fortunately, turning them off is dead simple. With your Bluetooth keyboard paired to your iOS device and turned on, open the Settings app and go to General > Keyboard.
Within the Keyboard menu, select "Hardware Keyboard" (you can ignore all the other settings toggles below it as they only apply to the on-screen software keyboard).
Within the "Hardware Keyboard" menu, you'll find three entries (on by default, as seen below) for "Auto-Capitalization", "Auto-Correction", and ""." Shortcut".
Toggle those three off and your hardware keyboard will now function in the traditional way, without trying to auto-correct you or otherwise inject the features of an on-screen keyboard into your hardware keyboard experience.
› How to Use a Physical Keyboard With Your iPad or iPhone
Jason Fitzpatrick is the Editor in Chief of LifeSavvy, How-To Geek's sister site focused life hacks, tips, and tricks. He has over a decade of experience in publishing and has authored thousands of articles at Review Geek, How-To Geek, and Lifehacker. Jason served as Lifehacker's Weekend Editor before he joined How-To Geek.