Connecting The Dots: Marvin And Android Access

Video: Connecting The Dots: Marvin And Android Access

1 Video: Connecting The Dots: Marvin And Android Access

When we first launched project eyes-free in early spring 2009, we promised to post frequent video updates to the eyes-free channel. Well, sadly, we have been remiss in keeping that promise --- but all in a good cause --- we were busy building out the needed accessibility APIs in the core Android framework.

We're now returning with a fresh set of video updates that demonstrate the new accessibility framework in Android, and how these access related tools mesh with the Eyes-Free shell shown earlier.

To summarize:

1. All of the eyes-free utilities from project Marvin continue to be developed in order to provide fluent eyes-free interaction.
2. The Marvin shell that we demonstrated last time continues to be my default home screen.
3. We have added an application launcher on the Marvin screen that can be launched by stroking 8.
4. This launcher uses stroke dialing to quickly navigate and launch applications.
5. With the launch of the Accessibility API in Android 1.6, and the accompanying Open Source TalkBack screenreader, I can now launch any Android application, e.g., Google Maps or YouTube.
6. TalkBack provides spoken feedback for native Android applications, including the settings menu.
7. You can use Android Market to install third-party applications, many of these work outof the box with TalkBack.

We'll demonstrate these, and a variety of other new cool enhancements in these forthcoming videos, stay tuned!

Author: T.V Raman <raman@google.com>

Date: 2009-03-30 Mon

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