Android TalkBack: Applications and Home Screen

Hi, my name is Ricky Enger and today we're gonna check out a few things related to our apps and home screen using talk back. We're using a Google Pixel phone for our workshop here but what we're learning should be pretty much the same for a lot of other Android phones as well.

For some phones though, we need a different method of organizing our home screen and working with our most recent apps because the phone is set up to use gestures with just one finger to do things. We have some really great resources covering what you need to know for those one finger gestures. So go ahead and scroll down the workshop page and check out the resources area to find that. Plus, there's info on how to contact us if you need to.

All right, we got lots of cool stuff to learn about today, so let's jump right in. We've talked before about our navigation bar across the bottom of the screen, right? It has our home button in the middle and on either side of it, there are other buttons. On the left, we have our back button and on the right we've got our overview button.

We're gonna dive into what that overview button actually does, but before we do, just a little hint that if you don't have this navigation bar at the bottom of your screen, we have a great resource if you scroll down the workshop page here, that shows how to change that or how to use gestures, instead of these buttons to get things done. Okay, so back to the overview button. Let's go find it at the bottom right of our screen.

Google Assistant: Overview button double tap to activate.

Ricky: So yeah, let's double tap.

Google Assistant: Recent apps, home, photos, three of four in list. Four items. Double tap to activate. Actions available. Use tap with three fingers to view.

Ricky: Oh, hey, so that's what this does. It gives us a list of apps we've recently opened. From what talk back just said, we know there are actually four apps open on this phone. We're on the photos app right now, which is the third one in the list.

Also, we heard those hints, right? Double tap to activate and our three finger tap for a list of actions. That's a lot of info in just a couple of sentences but it's really useful stuff to know. So let's just break it down a little. If we double tap here, that's just going to take us right back into our photos app. Okay, makes sense. But what about this three finger tap for actions? Let's do that and see what we get. So we've got our three fingers and we'll tap.

Google Assistant: Android accessibility suite. Talk back menu out of list. Actions in list. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: There we go. So let's double tap to find our actions.

Google Assistant: Actions out of list, close in list. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: All right, great. Here's how we just close this app all together. If we continue swiping right we'll find more options for our app here, including a cancel button to just close this pop up without doing anything. Let's go ahead and close this app though, since we're here. So we'll just double tap on close

Google Assistant: Tap phone. Fix a launcher. Phone three of three in list.

Ricky: Okay, there we go. We closed our photos app and we're right back in our recent apps list. We can use the same method to close any other apps here one at a time, but what if we just wanna close everything? Well, there's a handy little button to do just that. All we need to do is swipe left to the beginning of our list and just keeps swiping and we'll find that clear all button. So let's do that. We'll just swipe left until we find our button. Here we go. Just swiping left.

Google Assistant: Google Play store Play store. Two of. Settings one of three. Clear all button. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yay, there it is! So let's double tap and close everything.

Google Assistant: Home out of list.

Ricky: All right, nice. We closed all our apps and since there's really no need to show an empty apps list, we're right back on our home screen. Oh, except now I realized I wanted to open the settings app. Well, it's not in our overview anymore and it's not on the home screen either. So let's go find it. We've gotta open our apps list, which is our two finger swipe up from the bottom of our screen. We talk a lot about this gesture and all the things it can do in our workshop on two finger gestures. So yeah, go check that out if you haven't already. Okay, so here we go. We'll swipe up with two fingers.

Google Assistant: Apps list, search your phone and more edit box.

Ricky: All right, great. And now since S is pretty close to the bottom of the alphabet, we know we're gonna have to do a little scrolling to get to it, so we'll do our two finger swipe up again, and that will scroll us down a page.

Google Assistant: Apps list.

Ricky: Okay, and now we're just gonna touch near the bottom of the screen and see how close we might be to our settings app.

Google Assistant: Safety.

Ricky: Yeah, pretty close. So let's just swipe right then and that should do it. We'll swipe right.

Google Assistant: Settings. Double tap to activate. Double tap and hold to long press. Actions available. Use tap with three fingers to view.

Ricky: All right, yeah, there we go. You know what would be cool though? With an app like this, that we open a lot, it would really save some time to just have it right on the home screen. Maybe our list of actions will let us add it to the home screen. So let's do our three finger single tap here on our settings app.

Google Assistant: Talk back menu actions in list.

Ricky: And we'll double tap here.

Google Assistant: Shortcuts and notifications in list.

Ricky: All right, well that's not it. Let's swipe right.

Google Assistant: Add to home screen. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yeah, there it is! So let's do that. Let's double tap and add it.

Google Assistant: Find it added to home Pixel launcher. Settings.

Ricky: Hey wow, that was really easy. Now we've got our settings app right on the home screen so we can find it much more quickly than scrolling down the whole apps list to get to it. Awesome! Now, while we're here let's just check out one last thing. Our three finger single tap to get to our list of actions is pretty much the best thing ever because it gives us different actions depending on where we are and what we're doing. So as we're focused on our settings app here on the home screen, let's just check out that actions list one more time and see what we've got. So we'll single tap with three fingers

Google Assistant: Talk back menu. Actions in list.

Ricky: And of course we'll double tap here.

Google Assistant: Shortcuts and notifications in list.

Ricky: All right and let's swipe right.

Google Assistant: Remove.

Ricky: Okay, good. We can get rid of an app on the home screen just as easily as we added it and we'll swipe right again.

Google Assistant: Move item.

Ricky: Wow, cool! If we don't like where the app is on the home screen we can use this option to move it to somewhere we like better. We can even create folders if we wanna organize apps by category, that kind of thing. Okay, we'll swipe right again.

Google Assistant: Add to home screen.

Ricky: Yeah, well we've already done that. So let's keep going. We'll swipe right.

Google Assistant: Cancel button out of list. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: And there we go. Those are app options. Now, for our settings app we can remove it from the home screen but we can't remove it completely from the phone. It's kind of an important app. With our other apps though, we'll see the option to uninstall in our actions list as well. All right, great. Well, since we don't actually need to do anything to our settings app and we're right on the cancel button, let's double tap and close this pop up. We'll double tap.

Google Assistant: Pixel launcher settings.

Ricky: And there we go. We're right back where we started on our home screen and we're done. We learned how to get to the most recently used apps. We checked out our apps list and we added an app to the home screen. This was fun, right? I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today learning about the apps list and home screen. See you next time.