Develop Reference

accessibility android Skip nav links are not working

I have added skip to main content links on header in my web app. It works as expected in Windows and MacOS. It even works as expected in IPhone. But the same is not working in Android chrome/talk back.
when I check further, This skip nav links are not working even in webaim.org . The code I refer https://www.bignerdranch.com/blog/web-accessibility-skip-navigation-links/
Could someone please help why android chrome is having this issue? Is it a browser behavior? Please help.

Let's analyze what is happening in this scenario.
1) TalkBack sets ACCESSIBILITY_FOCUS to the element
This is very important, notice that this says ACCESSIBILITY_FOCUSnot FOCUS. For a hidden skipnav link to become visible it needs to get FOCUS as marking the element as visible (or perhaps shifting it on screen) with the :focus pseudo selector is a very common implementation of this. It's very important that such a control receives FOCUS, which it never does with TalkBack.
2) The user double taps to click the element they just heard get focus.
When the user activates the control a physical click event is set to the middle of the onscreen focus rectangle for the control. Similar to actually touching the screen.
3) The browser sees a physical click event occur on the page.
TalkBack essentially has blindly sent a mouse down event to an area of the page that has nothing or perhaps another control overlayed with this invisible element. Either way, the thing that the browser wanted to click was never "visible" because it never properly obtained FOCUS only ACCESSIBILITY_FOCUS and so the control is not there to be clicked.

Android How to make only part of the screen clickable?

I am going to code a walkthrough tutorial for my app.
I wish the user will follow the step of the tutorial. So I want to force the user to click on a specific button but not other parts of the app.
My app has many UI components and some of them are added programmatically so disabling them one by one is not practical.
One immediate solution is that I make a transparent Activity to cover the original Activity.
But I don't know how should I detect the touch event through the overlay Activity to operate the original Activity.
Or are there any better way to make a walkthrough tutorial on android apps without much affects to the original code? Tutorial is an adhoc feature and I dont want these adhoc features to ruin my coding with a lot of if-statement on every Activity.
Thank you.

Activity won't work. Only the one at the top of the stack can process infos.
Simply add a semi-opaque view above the screen using a relativelayout
Then simply monitor the ontouch event of this view. If the touch is in the accepted zone of the tutorial, then let it bubble up to underneath control. If if is outside the accepted zone consume the event.

Button btn = new Button(getActivity());
btn.setText("Next");
// Adding button to bottom
lv.addFooterView(btn);

Appcelerator: Proper Way Automatically Dismiss Keyboard

I'm writing an app using Titanium. I want to be able to automatically dismiss the keyboard anytime something outside of the text field is clicked. I have yet to find an elegant solution for this issue.
Couple things that I've thought about, but am still looking for a better solution:
Assign event listeners to basically everything else present in the view, and dismiss the keyboard (using textField.blur()). I want to avoid this since it results in a LOT of code just to dismiss the keyboard. Also, if I end up adding anything else to the view, I'll have to add a click listener to that object as well, so it's not very maintainable.
Create a large transparent view, and have it take up the entire screen. Place it directly beneath the text field and add to it one click listener on that which will dismiss the keyboard. This is a better solution than #1, but still isn't great because I've had a lot of trouble getting zIndexes to work properly. It's also inefficient for my purposes because I've got views with a specific width and height that encapsulate text fields. I've used these for the sake of code simplicity and I re-use them throughout my application.
I've tried adding a listener for the "blur" event for the text field but that doesn't seem to get fired appropriately.
That's about it. I'm sort of at a loss. The zIndexing also behaves strangely on the iPhone, and I haven't tried on Android yet. Also, as I mentioned above, many of the text fields I use are encapsulated within small views with set widths/heights-- so I think that will affect the functionality of Z-indexes.
So the root question is: What's the best way to dismiss a keyboard whenever anything outside the text field that's in focus is clicked?

If I'm correct the click event propagates through all views and windows therefore your #1 option could be modified to check for clicks on the bottom most layer (view or window), check for its source then decide what to do.

Any way to "fix" android's assinine keyboard handling?

First of all, I am aware of about 1000 other questions regarding the android keyboard... I am aware I can manually hide keyboard from window or control, and pass in any number of flags that are supposed to control where and when keyboard pops up.
Basically, I aim to have PREDICTABLE keyboard handling in my app... that is that unless explicitly told to focus this control, and popup keyboard, it'll only pop up when a user taps a text edit.
This app is extensive, and manually attempting to hide keyboard from even just the focused control (vs explicitly hiding each and every edit field).
I am also aware I can avoid the popup up keyboard when you dont want it there, by setting focus on a non text editable field, however, that seems like more of a hack than anything else.
So my question is... is there a way to just force app to never auto pop up keyboard on new dialogs, fragments etc... app wide? If I want this text field to et focus on new dialog, I'll manually handle those cases. In addition, any way to automatically handle keyboard dissapear when the previously focused control dissapears?
I just dont get logic there... if I step back and think about this, I'd only want keyboard popping up if I wanted to go type something. As far as keyboard popping up immediately when new dialog opens... seems like the exceptional case (there may be a couple times I'd want to do that).
I dont mind building a manager or something that keeps track of the state of keyboard, however i dont know if I can get at the information I'd need to make it work in a remotely intuitive manner, efficiently.
Any pointers or ideas would be greatly appreciated... because I am at my whits end with this... and I can assure you I've spent a good deal of time researching this and attempting fixes.
Note: Sorry about the title or hostility... I've fought this for quite some time, and been generally infuriated with how bizarre dealing with the keyboard can be.

So my question is... is there a way to just force app to never auto pop up keyboard on new dialogs, fragments etc... app wide?
No.
But you can use:
this.getWindow().setSoftInputMode(WindowManager.LayoutParams.SOFT_INPUT_STATE_ALWAYS_HIDDEN);
On each activity.

Ok, I think I get what you're asking. Have a look at the second answer here:
Stop EditText from gaining focus at Activity startup
You can specify in your AndroidManifest.xml whether or not the softkeyboard should be hidden by adding this android:windowSoftInputMode="stateHidden" to the beginning of your activities tag (<activity>)

Android app, showing a keyboard

I recently wrote my first app for android, and I created a listview for selecting an element from a list of about 500 items. Since it's basically the default listview, it's searchable, and I can bring up the onscreen keyboard by holding down the menu button, but I was wondering if there was a way to bring up the keyboard automatically (and not make it freak out if the phone has a physical keyboard). Does anyone know how I can do this? I've been searching around and haven't found anything.

Add this to your xml activity list definition (AndroidManifest.xml)
android:windowSoftInputMode="stateAlwaysVisible|adjustResize"

Maybe not exactly what you want, nevertheless; you could add a EditText above your list. When this EditText gets focus (which it will by default when you show your activity, presuming it's the first GUI component on the layout) it will also automatically trigger the software keyboard.
The neat thing of this approach is that it gets even more intuitive for the user that he or she can actually search the list by entering a search criteria.