Accessible Android Air application for the blind. Using Androids TalkBack

Question

I'm looking for some help on how to make an Air application accessible to the blind. Its required that I use the screen reader functionality that comes built into android called TalkBack.

After researching I have failed to find anything useful. I did find out that you can check if the device has accessibility aids using "Capabilities.hasAccessibility()" however that returns False even when the device does have aids and they are turned on (Accessibility.active is also set to False when TalkBack is active). I also found out that you could give a Display object AccessibilityProperties such as a name and a description that I assumed the screen reader would use. However, It doesn't work. I have also used the Accessibility.updateProperties() after adding the properties and still no luck. I also tried adding the permissions to the manifest for READ_PHONE_STATE (although I'm not really sure if that's what its meant for) but again no joy.

I'm using Actionscript 3 only. Not flex.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

As best I can tell, Adobe has decided to ignore the disabled community when it comes to mobile apps built with Air. There does not appear to be any way to implement accessibility for such applications.

I would love to be wrong about this, but as it stands now, I am pretty certain that this is the case.

Answer 2

From searching the past few days and doing a bunch of tests it seems that the accessibility features you can build into AIR applications are only going to work in browser-based apps. Any kind of stand-alone style app (.app/.dmg/.exe/.air) form of distribution doesn't seem to work with any of the accessibility tools we have tested. We tested Window-Eyes and the built in Narrator in Windows 7. I have been unable to find any Adobe documentation to confirm this, but it seems like a huge oversight for them not to mention it in any documents.