Android accessibility identify heading

Question

I have the latest version of Talkback and its announcing "My Top level Text Heading". Android native behaviour is adding "Heading" for my top level elements. I could not find a way to switch ON/OFF heading announcement. Is there an API to control its behaviour. In the previous version of Talkback versions it was not announcing "Heading" by itself.

Blakney

What kind of control are you using to get it to read this? I have the opposite problem, I WANT it to read heading and have been having to put it in manually on the content description. – Anlace

@Anlace Were you able to solve your issue? – Dareen

Answer 1

You can enable or disable the "heading" accessibility property of any View on API 19+:

ViewCompat.setAccessibilityDelegate(headingView, new AccessibilityDelegateCompat() {
  @Override
  public void onInitializeAccessibilityNodeInfo(View host, AccessibilityNodeInfoCompat info) {
    super.onInitializeAccessibilityNodeInfo(host, info);
    info.setHeading(true); // false to mark a view as not a heading
  }
});

If you have minSdk 28, you can simply set this directly in your XML:

android:accessibilityHeading="false"

Belanger

in which API this method added? AccessibilityNodeInfoCompat#setHeading(boolean) – Vermillion

Hi @Adam S , this does not appear to work for me. The textview is not announcing that it is a heading when you do setHeading(true). – Chenay

Yup, it's added in 28 developer.android.com/reference/android/view/accessibility/… – Sohn

Answer 2

Here is a simpler method:

ViewCompat.setAccessibilityHeading(headingView, false);

https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/core/view/ViewCompat#setAccessibilityHeading(android.view.View,%20boolean)

Partan

It's for 19 and lower. – Sohn

@KornilovRuslan The doc says that this is a no-op on API < 19 – Decagram

Answer 3

If you're only supporting API level 23 and above, you can simply do the following.

textView.setAccessibilityDelegate(new View.AccessibilityDelegate() {
  @Override
  public void onInitializeAccessibilityNodeInfo(View host, AccessibilityNodeInfo info) {
    super.onInitializeAccessibilityNodeInfo(host, info);
    //blanked to prevent talkback from announcing class/type
    info.setClassName("");
  }
});

Forsterite

Answer 4

I solved this by passing heading as false in

AccessibilityNodeInfoCompat.CollectionItemInfoCompat.obtain method.

        // set the heading attribute to false so that heading is not announced in label  

info.setCollectionItemInfo(
    AccessibilityNodeInfoCompat.CollectionItemInfoCompat.obtain(glp.getSpanIndex(),
 glp.getSpanSize(), spanGroupIndex, 1, false, false));

public static CollectionItemInfoCompat obtain(int rowIndex, 
int rowSpan, int columnIndex, int columnSpan,
boolean heading, boolean selected)

Blakney

how do you get glp, Or what's glp? – Siloa