DEV Community: Rajat Talesra

Talkback - Screen Reader in Android

Rajat Talesra — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 09:36:00 +0000

Previous?

Accessibility Scanner in Android

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 22 '22

This post is for android developers and anyone who is interested in mobile app development.

What is Talkback?

Talkback is a screen-reader by Google available in android devices. It gives spoken feedback so that anyone can use the device without even looking at the screen. This is especially useful for blind people.

How is it different from Accessibility Scanner?

Accessibility Scanner: detect errors, cannot be used by blind people
Talkback: cannot detect errors, actually used by blind people

Setting up Talkback

Open Google Play Store
Install Android Accessibility Suite app
Open Settings, search Talkback
Read all the information about it on the screen.
Turn on Use Service -> Allow

Common gestures while using Talkback

Swipe Left/Right: Screen reader outputs the audio for each view/item in the app so that blind people can understand what's going on in the app. Not all content is spoken at once otherwise the user will lose the context easily. To make it more friendly the screen reader allows swipe left/right gesture with which the user can navigate between views back-and-forth.

Double Tap: Exactly similar to single tap for non-accessibility users. Why? Because blind people can tap on screen but don't know exactly where to do that so screen-readers normally highlight a specific view and users can double-tap anywhere on the screen and it will act as single-click on that highlighted view.

Swipe up then right to view or Tap with three fingers: What happens if we have some swipe gesture? For example in Gmail app you can swipe on emails to archive or delete email. But how would an accessibility-user do that because a swipe gesture in such cases requires precision and sometimes a particular length of swipe too. For such cases this gesture (swipe up then right to view) helps users to navigate to new dialog which shows list of actions that the user can do on specific item.

Developer tips

Try to use any android app using Talkback and keep your eyes closed as this will give you much better context.
The screen-reader starts from top-left view of screen and with each swipe shifts to next view.
The format screen-reader follows is: <content-text>, <type-of-view>, <possible-gestures>.

The main goal of this post was to introduce you the challenges faced by blind people and how screen readers help them use different android apps.

Accessibility Scanner in Android

Rajat Talesra — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 16:51:00 +0000

Previous?

What is Accessibility in Android?

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 22 '22

#android #beginners #tutorial #mobile

This post is for android developers and anyone who is interested in mobile app development.

What is Accessibility Scanner?

Accessibility Scanner is an app/service in android which scans through screens and provide accessibility based suggestions like:

increasing the size of all clickable items - so that people with confined motor skills can click on items easily,
increasing foreground:background color contrast or text size so that people with color-blindness or low vision can read content easily, etc.

This service is useful for developers and testers and not for users.

Using Accessibility Scanner

Open Google Play Store
Download/Install Accessibility Scanner app
Open Settings and search Accessibility Scanner
Click on Use Accessibility Scanner -> Allow
You will notice a blue colored floating button with tick/check icon.
Now on any screen inside the app click on the floating button to take snapshot.
You will notice that the scanner scans the screen and gives suggestion/errors if any.

Developer Tips

Color Contrast

for large text(14sp bold or 18sp regular) foreground:background ratio should be >= 3 : 1
for small text foreground:background ratio should be >= 4.5 : 1

Touch Targets

Minimum size for any clickable item — 48dp x 48dp (including padding)
Minimum gap between two clickable items - 8dp

Content Labels

for clickable images, floating action buttons, etc. there should be meaningful content description.

Next?

Talkback - Screen Reader in Android

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 23 '22

#android #beginners #tutorial #mobile

The main goal of this post was to understand how to use Accessibility Scanner in android. Feel free to suggest changes or ask questions in comments.

What is Accessibility in Android?

Rajat Talesra — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 14:11:00 +0000

This post is for android developers and anyone who is interested in mobile app development.

What is Accessibility?

Accessibility is practice of making apps accessible by everyone, i.e., specially-enabled people should also have access to apps. It includes people with (but is not limited to):

blindness / low vision
deafness / impaired hearing
confined motor hearing
color blindness, etc.

How are android apps made accessible?

For people with blindness / low vision we have screen-reader apps like Talkback which basically reads out the entire screen of android apps and provides spoken feedback based on which person can also interact with the app.
For people with deafness / impaired hearing there are services like Live Transcribe, Sound Amplifier which provides captions in apps or increases the volume of any audio output in app
For people with confined motor skills android has services like Magnification, Switch Access, etc which makes it easy to use apps
For people with color blindness android has services like Color Inversion / Correction which provides range of color change options.

So in short for each form of disability android provides some form of alternate so that the apps can become accessible.

Why should we care?

15% of world’s population has some type of disability
they depend on accessibility apps/services to communicate, learn and work
accessibility is not just for those with disabilities. *Example *: Driver can give instructions to maps app using voice command, person doing exercise can get instructions from app by audio feedback.

Developer Tips

Accessibility is written as a11y or A11y or A11Y in short.
"a", then 11 characters in between, and then "y"

Next ?

Accessibility Scanner in Android

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 22 '22

#android #tutorial #beginners #mobile

Hope this post does explain what accessibility means and why we should care. Feel free to suggestion changes or ask questions in comments.

DEV Community: Rajat Talesra

Talkback - Screen Reader in Android

Previous?

Accessibility Scanner in Android

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 22 '22

What is Talkback?

How is it different from Accessibility Scanner?

Setting up Talkback

Common gestures while using Talkback

Developer tips

Accessibility Scanner in Android

Previous?

What is Accessibility in Android?

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 22 '22

What is Accessibility Scanner?

Using Accessibility Scanner

Developer Tips

Next?

Talkback - Screen Reader in Android Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 23 '22 #android #beginners #tutorial #mobile

Talkback - Screen Reader in Android

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 23 '22

What is Accessibility in Android?

What is Accessibility?

How are android apps made accessible?

Why should we care?

Developer Tips

Next ?

Accessibility Scanner in Android

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 22 '22

Talkback - Screen Reader in Android

Rajat Talesra ・ Jul 23 '22

#android #beginners #tutorial #mobile