Research Accessibility Support

[BeksOmega]

🔑 Use case

All solid Android components should support accessibility.

🔨 Proposal

I'm really not sure what accessibility means in the context of this component. I believe the primary thing will be implementing alternative modes of navigation (i.e. not swiping), but I don't know what Android expects you to provide.

Research needs to be done in this area to figure out how we can support accessibility.

If anyone has information it would be greatly appreciated!

Note that RTL mode (which sometimes falls under accessibility) is already supported.

📝 Other info

N/A

🐝 Request for assignment

I'm just creating this issue. But I wouldn't mind researching it.

[BeksOmega]

I'll take this one.

[BeksOmega]

I got accessibility working, but as always there were problems caused by the fact that the layout loops.

If you scroll the view so that you are viewing the "seam" of the layout e.g. views [6,7,1,2] talkback will act in a confusing manner. It will say something like "showing items 6 through two of seven" which doesn't make much sense.

You can see an example of this in this video:
https://imgur.com/ieWk7Mr

I attempted to make it so that the looping layout manager acts like a standard linear layout manager when the user is in accessibility mode (on the accessibility-as-linear branch). But this approach was going to make the LoopingLayoutManager code pretty messy. For example: that branch solved the main problem, but also broke smooth scrolling.

At this time I feel it is best to remove the as-linear changes leave the mostly-functional accessibility support in. Then outside developers may detect the accessibility mode themselves, and switch to a LinearLayoutManager if desired. This will probably end up being better anyway, because outside developers will be able to include their desired accessibility behavior, without me trying to figure out what they and their users want.

[BeksOmega]

I'm satisfied with the result of this issue, but I'll leave it up incase other people have ideas =)