Show virtual keyboard without text box

I am trying to show and get key presses from virtual keyboard without having a text box. So lets say I have a sprite and I want virtual keyboard to be always visible and when ‘a’ key pressed my sprite will go left and so on. So far I couldn’t find any way to do this without having some sort of text box.

Any suggestions? Or do I need to create my own keyboard with sprites?

Is this possible? I’d like to do this too (I need to divert the input to do ker-azy things rather than just type in a text box). Has the last 3 years yielded an answer?