Issue with VR Virtual Keyboard Textbox Focus

We are having issues with a virtual keyboard made with UMG. The keyboard consists of a keyboard widget and a textbox which is in a menu widget. The problem is that the keyboard buttons cannot be pressed until after the user has clicked on the text box. We would like the textbox to be selected immediately when it is spawned.

We built the keyboard by loosely following this tutorial: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/UMG/HowTo/VirtualKeyboards/index.html

Another user, RumbleBall, had the exact same issue in November but never got a response. They described the problem in much better detail.

We have tried setting the focus to the text box or to the keyboard widget using SetUserFocus or SetKeyboardFocus, but these solutions only focus the physical keyboard on the text box and not the widget interaction component.

Bumping this question