Android TalkBack keep highlighted position on Screen Rotation

Question

Use case:

1. Enable the Google TalkBack accessibility service and navigate to an app (eg Google Messenger )
2. In this app, assuming that you'll be presented with a list of items to select, arbitrarily navigate to one of them using Talkback gestures ( swipe right or just click once on one of them)
3. Rotate the screen

Expected behaviour:

• The previously highlighted item should still be highlighted; the user should be able to continue it's navigation
• The Google Messenger app is a perfect example of this correct behaviour

Messenger After rotation

My Sunshine app behaviour:

• The previously highlighted item is not highlighted after Screen Rotation
• The user has to navigate again to the previously selected item
• Depending on the screen, finding and having an item selected again can be a pain... not what we want to induce to our user

Sunshine After rotation

How should we implement this? I'm thinking, as a solution, at Accessibility Events and intercepting them... but this doesn't seem to be right, doesn't seem to be "best practice" (eg creating a Custom View and implement the methods handling these Events)

! Note that the green highlighted list item doesn't seem to be focused ( getCurrentFocused() returns null )

! Note that the list items become focused if we use D-Pad navigation, instead of TalkBack navigation (but this is another discussion...)

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LE:

• I've spend a whole day on this, trying to "get the focus" of the highlighted item, but the item is NOT focused . This is why I assume that this feature must be tackled in some other way and I would like to know your ( ! ) experienced opinion before I spend another 2 days re-creating all the used Android components (as I assume it could be done - this doesn't sound very "best practice", doesn't it ? )
• This is NOT a homework , there's nothing wrong with my current code (so, there's no code to post, unless one would like my whole project) and, given that this is my first post, I could not attach more than 2 pictures (this is why the "before" screens are missing)
• Just give me a good hint, based on experience, and I will implement it and post the finished, working code here.

Answer 1

It should work out of the box if you implement stable IDs in your RecyclerView.Adapter (and potentially disable the ItemAnimator on the RecyclerView ( rv.setItemAnimator(null) ) which you can do conditionally if TalkBack is enabled).

Here's a blog post I wrote about the item animator bug .

Answer 2

I ran into the same problem while working on the same project.

Hint: listView.setItemChecked(int position, boolean value);

Good luck :)