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SHAILEN TULI: Accessibility is about building things
that everyone can use.
For Android developers, it is about making
apps that can be used by all users,
regardless of how they interact with their Android devices.
Android users are a pretty diverse group.
Some are deaf or hard of hearing,
some have motor impairments, some
have cognitive disabilities that may impede learning,
and some may be blind or visually impaired.
And your apps should work for all these users.
Many of these users modify the default configurations
on their Android device so that they can properly
use that device.
In this video, you'll find out about these configurations
and how and why users may modify them.
This is a good way of getting a high-level sense
of accessibility features on Android devices.
All right.
Let's start by visiting your Settings screen.
Then find the Accessibility link and click on it.
And this should launch the Accessibility Settings screen.
This is the screen where a user can modify a device's settings
to make their device more functional for them.
And you should be familiar with the contents of this screen.
As a developer, you'll be returning to the screen
often in this training.
So what's on this screen, exactly?
On my Pixel device running Android R,
I first see any downloaded apps related to accessibility.
I see Accessibility Scanner installed on my phone.
And later in this training, you, too,
will install Accessibility Scanner
and learn how to use it to improve
your app's accessibility.
I've also installed Voice Access,
an accessibility service that lets
users control their devices with spoken commands.
Users can use their voice to open apps,
navigate, edit text hands-free.
After this, the screen shows Screen Readers,
which are often used by blind and visually impaired users.
TalkBack, a commonly used screen reader
that is probably already installed on your device,
allows users to interact with a device using touch and spoken
feedback.
Later in this training, you'll learn
how to use TalkBack to manually test your apps.
Select to Speak is useful for getting spoken feedback only
at certain times.
Users select items on the screen to hear them
read or described aloud, or they point to the camera
at something in the real world.
After this, you will see settings
for changing a device's display.
These settings can be used by visually impaired users
or those users who may struggle with the device's default color
settings.
This section includes settings for changing the font
and display size, toggling between light and dark themes,
using magnification, and turning on color correction and color
inversion.
In this training, you'll learn about ways
to make sure that your apps work well with many
of these settings enabled.
Next are settings related to interaction controls
on the device.
This includes Switch Access, which
lets users interact with their Android devices
using one or more switches instead of the touchscreen.
Switch Access is typically used by users
who may not be physically capable of touching the device
screen.
In this training, you will learn how to use Switch Access,
and you will use that to manually test your app.
This section also contains a way in which
the user can set how long ephemeral or short-lived
content should be displayed.
This includes things like toasts, snackbars, et cetera,
which can sometimes dismiss a little too quickly.
You will learn in this training how
to leverage the user's preferred time-out duration in your apps.
And the next section after this contains settings related
to audio and onscreen text.
These settings can be used to enhance the audio quality when
using headphones, and to customize how
audio is emitted on the device.
This section also contains settings
for transcribing speech to text and for captioning media.
And towards the bottom of the screen,
you'll see some experimental settings related
to high-contrast text, and a shortcut related
to turning on accessibility features from the lock screen.
If you are using a different version of Android,
or if you're using something other than a Pixel phone,
these settings may be laid out slightly differently.
But by and large, most Android devices
should allow these or equivalent ways for users
to modify the default ways in which their devices operate.
OK.
So we'll be returning to the Settings screen
often in these videos, and we'll talk
about the different options we've covered here
in much greater detail.
For now, remember, users prefer to interact with their phones
in many different ways.
During videos in this series, you'll
learn how to make your apps more accessible for all these users.
In the next video, you'll learn about how accessibility
works in Android--
how some things just work out of the box for users,
and other things that you enable by using accessibility APIs.
Links for that talk are provided in the description below.
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