talkback

RE: grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/…

The GrapheneOS project is taking significant steps to improve accessibility. I cannot comment on this implementation personally but the release mentions testing by blind and low vision users.

This is a major update to the GrapheneOS fork of the TalkBack screen reader for blind and low vision users. We migrated it to the latest upstream release of the TalkBack source code which was in a completely broken and unusable state. We fixed many major and minor issues with the code which has now passed testing by multiple blind and low vision users who depend on it. We also removed the dependency on Google Play.

The work to modernize our fork of TalkBack was started by a blind GrapheneOS user who has spent several years contributing to GrapheneOS and was completed by one of our newly hired app developers. It works well and is a huge improvement over the previous version despite the awful state of the upstream open source releases.

New post: Outside the Scope of Our Support

Google Disability Support’s final answer on the touch exploration bug: broken accessibility features are in scope, but my report wasn’t. They sent me to a forum. The issue I filed myself on the public tracker reached an engineer in 102 minutes.

And if a blind user who isn’t a developer had reported it? They’d get a cache to clear and a reboot. They should never have to file the bug themselves.

fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/…

New post: Have You Tried Turning TalkBack Off and On Again?
An Android bug can kill touch exploration for every screen reader until you reboot. I traced it to a stuck injected pointer in the input dispatcher and sent Google Disability Support a detailed report. Their answer: turn TalkBack off and on, clear Accessibility Suite’s cache, and reboot. Only then would they consider passing it to an engineer. Their form wouldn’t even accept my logs, only screenshots.
fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/…