Skip to content

Files

Latest commit

 

History

History
52 lines (35 loc) · 2.64 KB

UXChangeAnnouncements.md

File metadata and controls

52 lines (35 loc) · 2.64 KB

UX Change Announcements

All user experiences changes resulting from user interactions or automatic updates must be announced to accessibility services (such as TalkBack) in order to support the WCAG Success Criterion 4.1.3 Status Messages. (That said, it is reasonable and acceptable to rate-limit the announcement of automatic updates or they can overwhelm the user.)

There are two key techniques for providing UX change announcements: accessibilityLiveRegion and announceForAccessibility().

Use the android:accessibilityLiveRegion property to announce field value changes

The android:accessibilityLiveRegion property indicates a field that should announce its value whenever it is changed. This property has three possible values: "polite" waits for any announcement in progress to complete, "assertive" interrupts any announcement in progress, and "none" indicates that the field should not announce its value.

Note that fields with accessibilityLiveRegion active will announce their value when they are made visible, but no announcement is made when they are made not visible. (See the next technique for a way to handle that.)

In the following example, whenever the counter field's text is updated, its new value will be announced to accessibility services.

<TextView
    android:id="@+id/counter"
    ...
    android:accessibilityLiveRegion="polite"
    tools:text="Counter: 0"/>

Use the View.announceForAccessibility() method to announce events from code

The View.announceForAccessibility() method can be called at any point from code to make an announcement. This announcement is always "assertive."

The following example shows code announcing when a waiting indicator is dismissed using announceForAccessibility().

binding.waitingIndicator.announceForAccessibility(
    "Loading completed."
)
binding.waitingIndicator.hide()

(Note: The hard-coded text shown in these examples is only used for simplicity. Always use externalized string resource references in actual code.)


Copyright 2023-2024 CVS Health and/or one of its affiliates

Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with the License. You may obtain a copy of the License at

http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.

See the License for the specific language governing permissions and limitations under the License.