Android TalkBack: Reading and Navigation

Hi, my name is Ricky Enger. And today we're gonna check out our gestures for reading text with 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, these reading gestures aren't gonna work because the phone is set up to use gestures with just one finger to do things. We have some really great resources showing exactly what to do if these reading gestures don't work for you. 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.

You know, talk back is such a little chatter box. It's reading every single thing we do on our phone, which is really pretty cool, isn't it? But how can we get more control of what talk back is telling us? Like maybe we just wanna read everything on the screen or spell one single word character by character. Talk back gives us options to do all those things and we don't even have to learn a ton of new gestures to do them. We're gonna be using gestures with three fingers, two fingers, and one finger. So if you're not familiar with those yet, go ahead and check out the workshops in this series for those gestures to get up to speed.

Also, every phone is just a bit different. So, again, if you find that this three finger gesture that we're doing here doesn't work for you, check out the resources section down a little ways on the workshop page here for some great pointers on how to do this with your particular phone. Okay, so let's jump in and see what we got for reading controls here. To do this, we're gonna use our three finger swipe gesture. We'll just place our three fingers on the screen and let's swipe right and see what happens.

Google Assistant: Words. Swipe up our swipe down to read by words.

Ricky: Okay, nice. This control lets us read word by word. That could definitely come in handy. Let's keep swiping right with three fingers and see what else we got here. So, we'll swipe right

Google Assistant: Paragraphs.

Ricky: Great. And again

Google Assistant: Headings

Ricky: Nice. That will come in especially handy on webpages and we'll dive into that in our workshop on getting around on the web. And again, we'll swipe right

Google Assistant: Controls.

Ricky: All right. This one will move us through any buttons or other things like check boxes that we might have on the screen. That will come in handy as we move around different apps and web pages. Let's keep swiping right, here we go.

Google Assistant: Links.

Ricky: Okay, nice. And again.

Google Assistant: Windows.

Ricky: And again.

Google Assistant: Speech rate.

Ricky: And again, we'll swipe.

Google Assistant: Characters.

Ricky: And one more time we'll swipe.

Google Assistant: Words. Swipe up our swipe down to read by words.

Ricky: And there we go. We're right back where we started. And if you're thinking that there's gotta be a way to move backward through these options, yeah, of course there is. Let's do our three fingers swipe to the left this time and see what happens.

Google Assistant: Characters. Swipe up our swipe down to read by characters.

Ricky: Nice. So talk back does give us lots of ways to move through text and other items on our screen, but how exactly do we do that once we've told talk back how we wanna move? Well right now, after swiping through all those options, we're focused on reviewing our screen by character.

So, now we're gonna use a one finger gesture to do this. We're usually using our finger to swipe left and right to go through our icons and other things, but this time we're gonna swipe up or down instead. Down is gonna move us forward by whatever reading control we've selected and up will move us back. So let's check it out and see how it works. We'll swipe down with one finger

Google Assistant: Capital P.

Ricky: And again, let's swipe down.

Google Assistant: L.

Ricky: And let's keep going a couple of times.

Google Assistant: A. Y.

Ricky: Okay, great. Seems we've just spelled the word play, so looks like we're focused on our play store icon and we're moving through the name of it character by character. Let's switch our reading control real quick. And, again, to do that we're using our three fingers and we'll swipe right.

Google Assistant: Words. Swipe up our swipe down to read by words.

Ricky: Yep. There we go. Now, if we swipe down here, we should move to the next word, right? We've spelled out play, so our next word should be store. Let's swipe down with one finger just to see if everything works the way we think it should.

Google Assistant: Store.

Ricky: Okay, good, all is right with the world. That worked just as expected. And of course using our one finger to swipe up is gonna take us backward again. Let's do one last thing before we go and this one is gonna be really useful. There are times when we just need to read everything all at once without having to do a bunch of swiping around to read item by item. So we've got a gesture to read from where we are on the screen all the way to the end. This is gonna really be cool for reading our mail or reading a webpage.

Right now, we're on the home screen though, so we'll just try it here to see how it works. Our gesture is using two fingers and we're just gonna do three quick taps. Yeah, it's a new gesture, but it's a lot like gestures we've already done. So here we go. Two fingers and we'll just tap, tap, tap.

Google Assistant: Gmail, photos, YouTube has zero notification.

Ricky: Hey yeah, there we go. Reading the whole screen and we can just tap once with our two fingers to stop. Awesome. We've actually covered a lot today, right? So we've got our three fingers swipe right to move forward through our reading controls, a three finger swipe left to move backward. Then to read with that control, we use our one finger swipe down to move forward and up to move back. And finally this two finger gesture where we do our three quick taps will read the whole screen starting with where we're focused.

With these gestures, talk back can still be a little chatter box, but we have control of what we read and how we read it. Excellent. I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today learning talk back reading controls. See you next time.