Android TalkBack: Notifications

Hi, my name is Ricky Enger. And today we're gonna check out the notification shade 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, our two finger gesture to open notifications isn'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 covering that one finger angle gesture for opening notifications. 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, as much as the phone is a huge part of our daily lives, there are times when we're just not gonna be near it for whatever reason. So, there might be missed calls or texts, emails, things like that. And that's where our notification shade comes in. It's the area where we'll find important info from Google and from our other apps as well. So how do we get to it?

Well, we've covered this a bit in our workshop on two finger gestures, and now it's time to really dive in. So, we've got our two fingers spaced just a little bit apart. And we'll start at the very top of our screen at the status bar where we find our clock and battery info and so on. All right. And now we're just gonna swipe down with our two fingers.

Google Assistant: Notification shade, 8:37 a.m., Wednesday, June 15th, battery 49%.

Ricky: All right, here we are. Now let's check out what we have in our notification shade. We heard a lot of info initially, like our date and time and our battery level. Now we're just gonna start swiping right. And we'll see what else we have here. So, we'll swipe right.

Google Assistant: On wifi signal full [Google Assistant] Internet paradox switch. double tap to toggle, double tap and hold to open settings.

Ricky: Okay. Yep. There's our wifi info. We can turn wifi on or off just by double tapping and we can also double tap and just hold our finger on that second tap for a little bit to bring up the wifi settings. Great. Okay. Let's swipe right again

Google Assistant: On not connected. Bluetooth switch, double tap to toggle double tap and hold to open settings.

Ricky: All right, there's our Bluetooth. Let's swipe right again

Google Assistant: Off flashlight switch, double tap to toggle.

Ricky: Hey cool. There's where we can turn on the flashlight. Okay. Let's swipe right again

Google Assistant: Off. Do not disturb switch double tap to toggle double tap and hold to open settings.

Ricky: Yeah, there's that handy little setting to silence our notifications like maybe during sleep or any other occasion where we just need the phone to be quiet. Okay. Let's swipe right.

Google Assistant: Wednesday, June 15th, double tap to activate.

Ricky: And there's our date and we'll swipe right.

Google Assistant: Expanded Hadley bullet phone bullet six minutes ago missed call.

Ricky: Yay, looks like we've made it to the actual notifications in our notification shade. And yeah, this missed call from Hadley will give us a chance to see how all this works. So the first thing we hear is that this notification is expanded. We then hear more information like the caller when they called and so on. After that, we get a couple of hints, right? Double tap, double tap and hold actions available, things like that. We're gonna come back to that in just a second. For now, let's swipe right. A few times and listen

Google Assistant: Call back button double tap to activate.

Ricky: Okay, that's pretty cool. We can just tap to call Hadley back. We'll swipe again

Google Assistant: Message button double tap to activate.

- Yep. Same thing here. We can tap to send a text message and we'll swipe

Google Assistant: Collapse button, double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yeah. So let's do that. We'll double tap

Google Assistant: Expand button, double tap to activate.

Ricky: Okay, our button is a toggle. So if we tap it again, it will change to expand it once more. We don't wanna do that though. Let's see what collapsing a notification actually does. We're gonna swipe left and see what we got

Google Assistant: Collapsed Hadley bullet seven minutes ago, missed call.

Ricky: Interesting, we no longer have those options to call back or send a text. There's just that little bit of info about what we missed. That will be similar for other notifications as well. When they're collapsed, we just get that small bit of info. And when they're expanded, we have a few more options to work with. So anyway, while we're focused on this notification let's talk about one of those hints that popped up earlier where talk back, says actions, tap with three fingers to view. Let's find out what that's all about. So we've got our three fingers and we'll just tap

Google Assistant: Android accessibility suite. Talk back menu actions enlist, double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yep. This is our talk back menu. We can do a lot of cool stuff in here but this first item is what we care about right now actions. So we'll double tap that

Google Assistant: Actions out of list

Ricky: Let's swipe right and see what happens.

Google Assistant: Expand enlist.

Ricky: Okay, great. We can expand our notification and let's swipe right.

Google Assistant: Dismiss.

Ricky: Yeah. That's gonna be really useful. We can just dismiss the notification entirely since we've seen it now with one more swipe right We'll find that cancel button to just get rid of this menu without doing anything. While we're here, let's go ahead and double tap on our dismissed button.

Google Assistant: Silent, clear all silent notifications out of list Wednesday, June 15th.

Ricky: Okay, so talk back said a mouthful. But what has happened is that our notification is dismissed and we're back at the top of our notification shade. We've just got two more quick things to talk about. So we're just gonna swipe past all this stuff we've discussed already, until we get to these last important bits. All right, so here we go. Just swiping right quickly and just hearing the first couple of words for each of these options until we stop. So we'll swipe

Google Assistant: On wifi signal full, on not connected, off flashlight, off do not, Wednesday June, silent. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Okay. So let's stop here. Silent notifications. What does that mean? These are notifications that will show up in this area but we're not gonna have any alerts or sounds associated with them. They just appear here so that we can read them when we're ready. All right. Let's swipe right again

Google Assistant: Clear all silent notifications button.

- Yep. Makes sense. We can just double tap this button to clear anything in this area. Let's swipe right, again.

Google Assistant: Collapsed today's forecast. Charlotte bullet 33 minutes ago, 96 degrees, 73 degrees. Partly cloudy, see the full forecast.

Ricky: Okay, nice. This is a great example of a silent notification. We could dismiss it with our talk back actions menu with our three fingers, single tap but let's keep swiping just a couple times more. We'll swipe

Google Assistant: Expand button.

Ricky: And again, we'll swipe right

Google Assistant: Manage button.

Ricky: If we open this, we'll be able to tell our phone which apps should show notifications and whether those notifications should be silent or not. That's super youthful. Okay, one more time. We'll swipe

Google Assistant: Clear all notifications button.

Ricky: Okay, that's the end of our options here. And I think we pretty much know what this button does. Rather than needing to dismiss each notification one by one. We can just get rid of all of them with this one lovely little button.

All right. Wow. We really did a lot today and there's actually even more that can be done with this notification shade open. Scroll down the workshop page here to find more resources including info on accessing the quick settings for your phone from this area. How cool is that? I'm Ricky Enger and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today learning about the notification shade. See you next time.