Android Jelly Bean has been all good since its release at this years’ Google I/O in San Francisco, and we’ve been seeing many of its features lately. But there’s one thing that I was impressed with. And it is the care that Google has taken to incorporate the accessibility feature for the Visually Challenged people using the OS.
Android 4.1 offers reliability with ‘gesture mode’ for blind people to navigate the UI using Touch and Swipe gestures. This is in combination with the Speech output. One can move a cursor between controls to maintain a target for the next action or a source for the next navigation event. You can double tap anywhere to launch the current item with accessibility focus.
It supports Braille Text, which I think is the first of its kind, and Google has really mastered this. The letters written on screen is option for contacts, search the phone (with audio output) or surf the web. Get full support for braille accessibility services (download BrailleBack on Google Play).
TalkBack, is a brilliant and intelligent screenreader for Android. The feature now supports gestures to trigger actions, to navigate applications, and traverse text. One can even customize the gestures for actions to be performed.
For developers an event named OnGestureListener from the view android.view.GestureDetector has been added to the SDK which also includes GestureDetector.OnDoubleTapListener. Hence It is believed that from now on more applications would be developed on gestures and from now on next versions of Android might have advanced gesture modes with added features.
Having this said, I personally feel that Google has done something amazing on the Accessibility front. And we wish this continues in the versions of Android to come in the future. We’ve been messing up with the code and we’re finding it really very easy to implement these APIs into our app! Good Work Google!