The app runs on a basic handscanner- tiny screen, physical keyboard with English letters and numbers.
For 95% of user interactions, the flow is standard happy-path, no keyboard or screen interaction is needed. But for the 5%, there are menus to click through for the user to indicate the problem. The menus suck to work with (touch screens from 5 years ago, oh boy) so hotkeys were added- just press 'F' to do 'Foo', and 'B' to do 'Bar'.
The issue is that this app runs in many countries, some of which don't even use Latin alphabets. Our users often speak little to no English. There, we see fewer users using the hotkeys, and more incidents of the wrong hotkey being used. They want other options. Our suspicion is that the fact that the hotkeys are English-based is creating a barrier.
How does one localize hotkeys?
Notes:
-There really isn't a business case to be made for replacing all the keyboards on the units for this reasoning.
-The hardware we're using will be replaced by something new in the next few years, so we can't choose an option that is based on any specific hardware.