Android TalkBack: TalkBack Basics

Hi, my name is Ricky Enger. And today we're gonna get started with the TalkBack screen reader, just by learning a couple of the gestures that we're gonna be using, pretty much all the time, to do things on our phone. In the first workshop in this series, we learned about turning TalkBack on and off. So go ahead and check out that workshop, if you're wondering how to do that.

We're using a Google Pixel phone for our workshop here. But what we're learning should be pretty much the same on other Android phones as well. If things don't work the way you expect, or if you get stuck and 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.

All right, so we've got TalkBack on now. What do we do next? There's this smooth piece of glass that we need to explore, somehow. Well, let's start just by touching the phone with one finger. It seems like a pretty natural thing to do, right? Why don't we start at the very top of our screen, where we'll find a little row of information here, called the status bar. We've got the time, how strong our wifi and cell signals are, our battery level. Yeah, lots of great stuff. So let's just use one finger, and touch the top left hand corner of our screen, and see what happens

Google Assistant: System UI 3:35 PM.

Ricky: And there we go. We heard the time. Now let's check out what's below our status bar. This whole area below the status bar, is called the home screen. And it's where we'll find the different things that we can open and use, like our messages app, our phone app, our settings, that kind of thing. So we'll just move our finger down a little bit on the screen, and touch.

Google Assistant: Pixel launcher, sunny. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Okay, awesome. There's our weather, plus a little hint about double tapping. We'll hear these hints in a lot of different places as we use our phone, and they can really be helpful for figuring out what to do next. We'll get back to that double tap gesture in a little while. For now though, we've kind of been moving our finger around, and touching in a general area, but seems like we could miss stuff on the screen this way. It would be really cool if we could move through everything here in a more logical way. And that actually brings us to our next gesture, which is the swipe gesture. For this one, we'll use our one finger, and we're just gonna swipe, or flick that finger across the screen from left to right. It's kind of like there's a piece of dust or something stuck on the screen, and we just wanna brush it off. So here we are, on our weather icon, and let's swipe right, on our screen.

Google Assistant: Play Store, double tap to activate. Double tap and hold to long press. Actions available. Use tap with three fingers to view.

Ricky: Okay. Wow. TalkBack is definitely talking back. That was a lot of info. But, hey, we did it. We moved from our weather icon, to the Play Store icon. Let's try one more time. So we'll just swipe right.

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

Ricky: Yep. We did it again. We've moved to the next icon. Nice. But what happens when we need to move back, instead of forward? Well, we're just gonna do our swipe gesture, but this time we'll go in the other direction. So we'll just do that brushing, or flicking motion, from right to left this time. So let's try it, and see what happens. We'll swipe left.

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

Ricky: And there we go. We went back one icon, and we're on the Play Store. Okay. This is pretty cool, right? Now, TalkBack, keeps telling us about that double tap thing. Double tap to activate. Seems like a good time to see what that's all about. So we're here on the Play Store, and let's just use the same finger we've used to touch and swipe, only this time, we're just gonna tap our screen twice quickly. So we'll just tap, tap.

Google Assistant: Play Store, Play Store, selected for you. Heading. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Hey great. We've opened our Play Store, just using that quick double tap gesture. By the way, if you're concerned that when it's time to double tap, maybe your finger is moved, like maybe now you're in the middle of the screen somewhere, or something, that's totally fine. When TalkBack speaks what we've touched, our focus just stays there, until we touch something else that TalkBack speaks, or until we swipe to another icon. Okay, we've actually done a lot today. Let's just do one more quick thing before we go. So at the top of our screen, we have our status bar, with the time the wifi, the battery info, and all that, right? Well, at the bottom of our screen, we have something that's equally important. This is called the navigation bar. This bar down at the bottom of the screen is always gonna be there. And it can help us get where we need to go, quickly. Now, every phone is a little different, and some phones actually don't have this bar at the bottom, by default. So when we get to this next part, and you find that nothing is matching up with what's here in the workshop, it's because the phone has been set up to use a set of gestures, instead of our navigation bar. No big deal though, because we've got a great little handout in our resources section, if you scroll down a little ways on our workshop page here, that talks about how to set your phone to use the navigation bar. And it also goes through the alternative gestures, if you wanna keep the setup the way it is now. All right, so let's just touch near the bottom left corner of the screen, and see if we've got a navigation bar.

Google Assistant: Navigation bar. Back button. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Okay, cool. There it is. And this back button will take us back to whatever was happening before. So in this case, we were on our home screen. Then we opened our Play Store. Back will just take us back to the home screen. Okay. Let's do a little swiping now. We'll swipe right.

Google Assistant: Home button. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Awesome. This button will do just what you might imagine. It's gonna take us back to the home screen. Okay. We have one more here. We'll swipe right.

Google Assistant: Overview button. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: All right. So this one will bring up a list of apps that we have open on our phone. So for example, right now it would show the Play Store, that we just opened. Then if we open Gmail, our overview is gonna show that too. We'll dive into that in more detail later. For now though, why don't we get back to our home screen? We just found that on our navigation bar, and it's to the left of our overview button. So we'll swipe left

Google Assistant: Home button. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: And let's do that. So tap, tap.

Google Assistant: Pixel launcher. Play Store. Double tap to activate.

Ricky: Yes, we did it. We're back on our home screen and TalkBack is focused on our play store icon. So with just these few gestures, the touch gesture, our swipe gesture, and that lovely little double tap gesture, we can really do a lot with our phone now. Awesome. I'm Ricky Enger, and I'm glad you could spend a little time with me today, learning a few beginning, TalkBack gestures. See you next time.