I see this question come up frequently: “How do I type xxx character in xxx language?”
Many courses provide an on-screen virtual keyboard built into them, but not all! There are times you need to have the language-appropriate keyboard installed. Some/many courses provide virtual on-screen keyboards to enter the accented characters, but it is always easier and faster to answer directly from your keyboard without having to click on buttons on-screen. The virtual keyboards provided in a course are not necessarily standardized and the course creator has the freedom to lay out the keyboard the way they see fit.
A key point to be made here is that the course you are learning determines what is correct or acceptable as an answer, i.e. do you have to type é or ç or will your course accept e and c as acceptable answers? If a course creator enables “strict typing” then you must answer with accented characters and non-accented characters will be errors.
So, you really want to take the time to install and learn the keyboard for the language you are studying. It is actually not as difficult as many would have you believe. Don’t listen to them! I recently read a post from a native French speaker using a French keyboard who still doesn’t know how to type é or è, etc. because they said they just couldn’t be bothered to take the time to learn how. C’est dommage! So, the real question is how serious are you about really learning the language? I guarantee you that if you invest the small amount of time it takes to learn to type on a ‘foreign’ keyboard then you will be paid back many times over in terms of the time you’ll save when testing. You’ll no longer have to hunt-n-peck to enter the characters. And, of course, it spills over into any other writing that you do in your target language. When you search the web in French or Greek or Russian, how do you type the input?
On both the Mac and Windows you can (and absolutely should IMHO) install the keyboard(s) for your target language. For example, I have English, Canadian French CSA (which I find easier than standard French), Greek and Russian keyboards all installed, which are easily switchable, i.e. you can simply toggle through them by pressing Command + Spacebar.
It takes about 15-20 minutes to get used to typing on a different keyboard and you don’t have to learn all kinds of crazy Alt+nnn keyboard mappings. Of course, some languages may be more challenging, but many have several variant keyboard layouts so you can try different ones out and pick the one that works best for you.
And if you make use of the Keyboard Viewer (on either Mac or Windows) you will quickly see how to get all of the other keys and combinations by simply pressing Shift, or Command, or Alt, or Option, etc.
For a how-to on the Mac check this out:
Windows 10:
You can also Google for how to do this on other devices, like your iPhone or Android.