Talkback announces focused button's label first before the title on Android TV

Question

I'm implementing a screen for Android TV, which has a screen title and a button on the left side. And a list of custom views/rows(selectable/clickable), arranged vertically, on the right side of the page.

We want the button on the left to be in focus when the user sees that screen. For that, I'm calling button.requestFocus() in the onResume() of the fragment.

This breaks the accessibility. When talkback is enabled, the first thing announced is the button's label. What I want is to announce the title first and then the button's label.

I tried to announce a custom text(could be title) by

rootView.announceForAccessibility(accessibilityText)

where rootView is the root of the xml layout and accessibilityText a text which needs to be announced.

But it doesn't help, and the button's label gets the priority.

How can I solve the issue?

Answer 1

I took a cue from this article by ATAUL MUNIM. I added a check if talkback is enabled, before requesting the focus explicitly.

 protected fun isTalkBackEnabled(): Boolean {
    val a11yServices = context?.getSystemService(ACCESSIBILITY_SERVICE) as? AccessibilityManager
    return a11yServices?.isTouchExplorationEnabled?:false
}

and

if(isTalkBackEnabled().not()) {
   button.requestFocus()
}

This solution pretty much bailed me out from the problem I was facing. It was also the only way forward for me because my app's min API level is 21 which eliminates the option to use android:screenReaderFocusable