Programming for Android as a blind person

Question

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

I'm up dating my answer with my experiences. I bought a refurbished first gen Nexus 7 to try and learn Android programming. Installing the Android SDK with the bundled Eclipse was completely accessible. I was also able to enable accessibility on my Nexus 7 with no sited help. Enabling developer settings on the Nexus was also fully accessible. I was able to create an Android project using Eclipse with no problems. I was unable to use the graphical layout editor to add Widgets to a layout, although I was able to edit the XML to create a button with no issues. It looks like layouts are doable, you will just have to reference the docs for proper XML a lot. I created a method to be called when the button was clicked with a for loop so I could test debugging. I debugged the application on my Nexus and set a breakpoint in the body of the for loop. I was able to use standard Eclipse functions to step by line once the breakpoint was hit and view variable values. So far Android accessibility is looking good for the standard Android SDK. I am planning on testing out Android Studio and will update my answer with the results.

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/

Answer 2

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?