Programmatically change Windows keyboard language

Dear colleagues

I am writing an application which uses the numbers in the top row of the keyboard as keyboard shortcuts to trigger some functions. I use WindowKeyPressFcn and event.Key to get which key was pressed by the user.

I live in Czechia and most people here have two keyboards installed on their computers: Czech keyboard and English keyboard. On the Czech keyboard, however, the numbers in the top row are substituted by letters with accents (in Czech language we use them a lot). My application, however, does not work when the input is those special Czech characters instead of numbers.

1) Is there a way to read the key codes instead of the current character, which would be independent of which keyboard is set in Windows?

2) Is there a way to programmatically change the keyboard to English (e.g. whenever the user runs my application)?

I am using Matlab R2019b.

Thank you for any suggestions

Jan Kudláček (you can see the letters with accents in my surname :-) )