Explore by Touch
Explore by Touch
By turning TalkBack on, you have also enabled TalkBack’s Explore by Touch mode. This means the
device will speak information about the item immediately after it is pressed. (This assumes that the
item pressed specifies information TalkBack can read, which you will learn more about shortly.)
Leave the Up button selected with accessibility focus. Double-tap anywhere on the screen. The device
returns you to the Accessibility menu and TalkBack announces information about what is showing:
“Accessibility.”
Android framework widgets, such as Toolbar, RecyclerView, ListView, and Button, have basic
TalkBack support built in. You should use framework widgets as much as possible so you can leverage
the accessibility work that has already been done for those widgets. It is possible to properly respond to
accessibility events for custom widgets, but that is beyond the scope of this book.
To scroll the list, hold two fingers on the screen and drag them up or down. Depending on the length
of the list, you will hear tones that change as you scroll. These tones are earcons, sounds used to give
meta information about the interaction.
Linear navigation by swiping
Imagine what it must be like to explore an app by touch for the first time. You would not know where
things are located. What if the only way to learn what was on the screen was to press all around until
you landed on an element that TalkBack could read? You might end up pressing on the same thing
multiple times and, worse, you might miss elements altogether.
Luckily, there is a way to explore the UI linearly, and in fact this is the more common way to use
TalkBack: Swiping right moves accessibility focus to the next item on the screen. Swiping left moves
accessibility focus to the previous item on the screen. This allows the user to walk through each item
on the screen in a linear fashion, rather than trial-and-error poking around in hopes of landing on
something meaningful.