What is the Android Accessibility Suite?

What is the Android Accessibility Suite?.

Smartphones are great devices, but they’ve actually created several challenges for people with special accessibility needs.

First, smartphone interfaces are now highly visual in nature. The use of icons and other visual elements allows the user to interact with the device. Multi-touch screens also made it impossible to control the device with one touch. Smartphones, on the other hand, are powerful enough to use technologies like voice recognition to compensate for this shift.

You can also easily add dedicated devices to your smartphone using the USB port. However, none of this matters unless you have software written specifically to combine it all into useful features for users with various disabilities. This is where the Android Accessibility Suite comes in.

The Android Accessibility Suite Components

The Android Accessibility Suite is a fairly recent rebrand of several Google apps under one roof. It actually consists of three different applications:

Accessibility Menu: An extensive control menu designed for visually impaired users.
TalkBack: A screen reader for Android that reads everything on the screen aloud. It includes gesture-based controls and an on-screen braille keyboard.
Select to Speak: This allows you to select items on the screen and read them aloud.
Switch Access: This allows physical switches or keyboard to be connected to an Android device to control it, rather than a touchscreen.

Let’s take a look at each component and discuss how to use it.

How To Activate the Android Accessibility Suite

In most cases, you probably don’t need to install the package on your Android phone. It should already be installed by default. You can easily check this by simply going to the Google Play store, searching for the package and checking if it’s already installed.

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This is where it gets a little tricky. On a device running a standard (or near-standard) version of Android, it is quite easy to activate the tools in the package:

Open Settings

Select Accessibility

Select the package application you want to activate and configure.

The problem is that each manufacturer has their own Android interface. Thus, if you are using an LG phone, things may look different than a Samsung or Xiaomi device. We’re using the Samsung Galaxy Note 10+ here, but you might have to look around for options on your specific phone a bit.

Also, keep in mind that your phone will likely have brand-specific features as well. In the case of the Samsung phone that we have, there are several Samsung apps mixed with the Google package.

While Google apps are designed to work together, it’s likely that running other accessible apps at the same time will cause conflicts or strange behavior. So only activate the apps you need and want to use.

Setting Up the Accessibility Shortcut

Most people will likely only use one of the package’s apps, but they probably don’t want it to be active all the time. Fortunately, there is a handy shortcut to activate the main tool in seconds. All you have to do is hold down the volume up and down buttons at the same time for a few seconds.

The first time you do this, you will be prompted to indicate which of the various accessibility tools you want to associate with the shortcut. After that, you can optionally enable and disable your preferred tool from the package.

If you want to change it later, you can find it in the advanced accessibility settings.

If you can see the screen well, you can also click the small accessibility icon that appears to the right of the Android shortcut bar when you activate any of these tools.

How To Use the Android Accessibility Suite Menu

The Accessibility Menu is a large, easy-to-read system menu that contains some of the most common functions that you need quick access to:

Take a screenshot.
Lock the phone
Adjust volume and brightness
Settings and notifications
Google Assistant

The Android accessibility menu also has its own shortcut. So it doesn’t take the volume button shortcut. Assuming you’ve activated it, you simply swipe up with two fingers. If TalkBack is also running, you can do this with three fingers. Or use the accessibility icon mentioned above.

It works just like any other menu, just choose the option you want!

How To Use Talkback

After activating TalkBack and setting it as your preferred tool for quick access to the volume button, you can activate it and start using it almost immediately.

TalkBack takes some getting used to. There are several main ways to use it to navigate your phone. The easiest way is to slowly swipe your finger across the screen. When you slide your finger across each element of the screen, TalkBack will tell you what it is. When you find the button or other interactive element you want, you can double-click anywhere on the screen to activate it.

How To Use Switch Access

Switch access allows you to use a USB or Bluetooth switch to control your phone. When you first set up Switch Access, you’ll also tell it which switches you are using and how they should act. The wizard is very detailed, so you won’t have any problems getting it working.

This is just an example of what we did in the setup wizard. It will differ depending on your needs and what you are using as a switch.

We used a standard Xbox One S controller connected via USB to the phone. Switch Access detected this immediately, and we were able to assign both toggle functions to any buttons on the device.

At the end of the setup process, you can play tic-tac-toe with the switches to make sure everything is working as expected.

How To Use Select To Speak

After activating Select to Speak in the accessibility tools, all you have to do is tap any item on the screen. Text and text in images work, and you can drag your finger to select groups of items. There is also a play button that will sound everything on the screen.

What’s more, you can open the camera app and point the camera at anything. Select to Speak will then read aloud any text that the camera is looking at. Just press the accessibility button in the camera app to activate it.

However, we couldn’t really get this to work. Only getting the error “there is no text in this place.” To be honest, we highly recommend the Microsoft Seeing AI app instead, which uses machine learning to describe the world around you. Not only text, but any objects.

How Well Does Android Accessibility Suite Work?

There is no perfect accessibility solution. Moreover, there are no two people with the same vision, hearing and mobility problems. We have to give Google credit for the fairly comprehensive set of accessibility tools built into Android.

It’s hard for us to judge how well these apps do their job for each individual’s unique settings and needs, but from what we’ve tried, Accessibility Suite does deliver what it promises.

That said, there is always room for improvement, and we believe Google should look into integrating more of its artificial intelligence technologies. Using voice, facial recognition, and prediction technologies to improve these relatively simple accessibility tools.

What’s impressive, though, is that you can use almost any USB controller with an Android device, which means a lot of people can grab cheap off-the-shelf devices and give access to someone with very limited mobility.

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