Programming for Android as a blind person.

Question

Hello All,

I have a friend who is quite a capable programmer, especially considering that he is blind. Now he would like to start developing for Android. But, the problem I see him running into is that there appears to be no accessibility features for the Android emulator. Ideally he would be able to have his computer read the contents of the Android emulation screen to him. However, at least from what I've seen, the contents of the Android screen and the buttons that can be used to manipulate the emulation Android etc. are all invisible to a screen reader.

Does anyone know of a workaround for this?

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UPDATE: I found what looks like a promising resource here. It's a Text-to-Speech library for Android developed by T. V. Raman of Google. I'm still looking for more information from the community though.

Answer 1

One option might be to do debugging on a real phone with accessibility turned on. Debugging works essentially the same (and you don't have to deal with the slowness of the emulator - I much prefer this method because it's so much faster).

It's surely a more expensive option if your friend doesn't already have an android phone.

I think the better question might be "why are the accessibility features missing from the android emulator"? Maybe text-to-speech is too slow on the emulator?

Answer 2

There's a (somewhat dated) video about Android accessibility at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xS-ju61vOQw

Answer 3

A long thread on this can be found at http://www.freelists.org/post/programmingblind/Is-Android-Programming-Accessible What I've gathered from it is that accessibility can be enabled with little to no sighted help. When I tried enabling talkback it made the emulator unusably slow although this was over a year ago so maybe things have gotten better? I'm a blind programmer and know Eclipse is accessible with Jaws so he should be able to program with either an IDE or command line and a text editor. I haven't researched this but if the emulator is slow maybe another option would be to run an x86 build of Android in VMWare player? A screen reader written by google employees can be found at http://google-opensource.blogspot.com/2009/10/talkback-open-source-screenreader-for.html and one written by someone else can be found at http://spielproject.info/