Hi TalkBack! 👋

TalkBack is the default screen reader for Android devices, it comes pre-installed for most devices that bundle Google Apps. Invest some time familiarizing yourself with the many options it offers. Here’s a quick rundown of the ones that I consider most relevant during development.

To access TalkBack options navigate to Settings > Accessibility >TalkBack.

Display speech output

This will make every thing that is spoken read on the bottom part of the screen, similar to the captions in a movie. It is very useful to confirm that you spelled everything correctly when testing the app, and is really useful for displaying navigation on photos such as the ones on this article.

TalkBack screen dimming

Screen dimming places an almost fully opaque black canvas on top of your entire screen for a period of 3 minutes, allowing you to experience the app closer to as a visually impaired user would. You can also enable the “Dim screen shortcut”, that toggles this mode by tapping both volume keys simultaneously 3 times!

Screen on the right is what you get after turning on dimming

TalkBack Tutorial

Last but not least, if you never did so before, you should complete the TalkBack tutorial. First of all to be able to use the phone properly when you enable TalkBack, but most importantly to get a proper sense of what kind of gestures and actions you can perform, it will allow you to create a better experience.

Design for accessibility

A lot can be said about designing for accessibility, I’ll post more about this subject in upcoming articles about accessibility. One thing to always keep in mind, specifically when it comes down to screen readers, is that you’ll effectively end up with 2 very distinct ways of interacting with your application, the one you can see and the one interpreted by a screen reader.

I divided the subject into several sub-topics. By no means is this exhaustive, I tried rather to get you thinking how these 2 different interfaces require different mindsets.