Android TalkBack: Two Finger Gestures

Hi, my name is Ricky Enger, and today we're gonna learn several really useful TalkBack gestures that we can do with two fingers. We've got a workshop in this series where we cover some TalkBack basics, including a few gestures that we can do with one finger.

The cool thing is that if we know those one-finger gestures, that's actually a great start for what we're doing today because these two-finger gestures are gonna use those same concepts of swiping and tapping that we've practiced before. We're using a Google Pixel phone for our workshop here, but what we're learning should be pretty much the same for other Android phones as well. If things don't work the way you expect, or if you get stuck and you just need to talk things through, Hadley's here to do that with you. So if you scroll down the workshop page, you'll find some cool resources, plus there's info on how to contact us if you need to.

Now, with these two-finger gestures, is there anything special we have to do, like, a certain way of putting our fingers on the screen? Or do we have to use specific fingers or anything? The answer is not really, but there are a couple of things we can do to make these gestures feel a little more natural. So, the index and middle fingers work really well for these gestures, and it can help to leave just a little space between our fingers when we put them on the screen.

Think about the thumb trying to kind of squeeze in between these two other fingers and push them apart to make room for itself. That thumb width is a nice amount of space. So, yeah, not a ton of space at all, just enough so that the phone knows for sure that these are two fingers, not one giant finger.

Okay, so, now that we've got our finger placement right, let's learn our gesture for bringing up the notification center. This is where we'll find things like missed calls and messages, reminders, maybe some weather updates, things like that. It's a pretty important part of the phone, and there's a lovely little workshop in this series where we talk all about it. For now though, let's figure out how to get to it. We're gonna start by moving to the top of the screen to the status bar where we have our clock and battery status, and so on. So, let's just touch the top left corner of our screen.

Google Assistant: System UI, 3:22 p.m.

Ricky: Okay. And now let's swipe downward with our two fingers. So it's like we're brushing or flicking something off of the screen. And we'll just do that quick motion from the top down. We don't have to slide all the way from the top to the bottom, just that quick flicking or swiping motion down. So, we'll swipe down with two fingers.

Google Assistant: Notification Shade, 3:23 p.m.

Ricky: All right, we did it! Here's our notifications area. By the way, we can actually try this swipe gesture anywhere on the screen and it may work just fine. For consistency though, it's a good idea to swipe down from the top of the screen. And our status bar at the very top of the screen gives us a really nice, little landmark to start from. Okay, let's get back to our Home screen so we can practice our next gesture. We'll just head down to the very bottom of our screen and we'll touch the Home button. That's in the middle of our row of three buttons on our navigation bar. Oh, and remember, if you don't have that navigation bar, take a quick look at our resources section for information on how to add it, or how to use gestures instead of this little bar at the bottom of the screen. So, we'll touch our Home button.

Google Assistant: Navigation bar, Home button.

Ricky: Okay, so, now we'll just tap, tap.

Google Assistant: Pixel Launcher, Home.

Ricky: All right, cool. Now, for our next gesture. If we can swipe down, then there's probably something that will happen if we swipe up instead, right? So, let's do that and see what happens. We'll use our two fingers, and let's just start near the bottom of the screen so we have a little room to swipe. And we'll swipe up.

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

Ricky: Awesome. So that's what this gesture does when we use it on the Home screen. It brings up a list of apps on our phone. There's actually a search box here at the top where we can search our phone or Google. Then below that, we'll find a list of apps we've opened recently. And then finally, there's a list of every app on the phone organized alphabetically. So, yeah, the apps list is going to come in pretty handy. And again, we get to it just by swiping up from the bottom with two fingers when we're on our Home screen.

We're not quite done with this two-finger gesture yet though. Let's head over to the Settings app. We can open that in lots of different ways, like, asking our Google Assistant to open Settings, using this little search box to search the phone for it, or by finding the Settings app and double tapping to open. It just so happens to be right here in the list of recently used apps at the top here on this phone. So, we can swipe right a few times until we get to it. So yeah, let's do that. Let's just start swiping right.

Google Assistant: Preferences button, Photos, YouTube, Gmail, Settings. Double tap to activate. Double tap and hold to long-press. Actions available, use tap with three fingers to view.

Ricky: So here we go. I'm just gonna tap, tap.

Google Assistant: Settings, Sound and vibration, volume, haptics, Do Not Disturb, end list. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Okay, great. So there's a lot of stuff in the Settings app. There's actually way too much to fit on a single screen. Now, we could just use our one finger and right swipe to go forward through these things one by one, and then use our left swipe to go back. But again, there's a lot here. So, we're gonna use our two-finger gesture and swipe up, just like we did to get to our apps list from the Home screen. This will let us move quickly through a list of items rather than swiping through them one by one. So, we'll swipe up.

Google Assistant: Security, Screen lock, Find My Device, app security. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: All right, nice! We heard a couple of things happen. We jumped down to our Security section in our Settings and there was also a little sound, kind of a high-pitched plink sound. This little sound tells us how close we are to the bottom of the list. The higher the sound, the closer we are to the bottom.

We're basically moving to a new section of our list here, and TalkBack is gonna place our focus at the top of that new page or section. So, our two-finger, swipe-up gesture when we're inside an app or a webpage is what we're using to scroll through our content. So if two fingers swiping up is scrolling to the bottom of our list, makes sense that if we two-finger swipe the other direction, we're gonna move back toward the top of our list. So yeah, let's do that and see what happens. We'll swipe down.

Google Assistant: Wallpaper and style, Colors, themed icons, app grid. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yep. And along with that, we heard our little sound, only this time, it was pitched lower. So, the lower our sound, the closer we are to the top of the list or whatever content is on our screen here. When we scroll in this direction, so we move back a section, TalkBack will place our focus at the bottom of that section of our list here.

This is pretty cool, right? We've used our two fingers to swipe up or swipe down. And depending on where we are on the phone, these gestures do two different things. We can scroll, just like we did here in our Settings app, or if we're on the Home screen, swiping down is gonna open our notifications area and swiping up will bring up our apps list. Nice.

There are even more gestures we can do with two fingers, just like we did with our single-finger gestures. So, double tapping with two fingers, swiping left and right with two fingers, that kind of thing. We'll definitely cover those in other workshops in this series.

But hey, if you want a sneak peek, we've got a great little handout in our resources section if you scroll down a little ways on our workshop page here to find a list of TalkBack gestures. I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today, practicing some two-finger TalkBack gestures. See you next time!