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, wepromised to post frequent video updates to the eyes-freechannel. Well, sadly, we have been remiss in keeping that promise --- but all in a good cause --- we were busy building out theneeded accessibility APIs in the core Android framework.

We're now returning with a fresh set of video updates thatdemonstrate the new accessibility framework in Android, and howthese access related tools mesh with the Eyes-Free shell shownearlier.

To summarize:

1. All of the eyes-free utilities from project Marvin continueto be developed in order to provide fluent eyes-free interaction.
2. The Marvin shell that we demonstrated last time continues tobe my default home screen.
3. We have added an application launcher on the Marvin screenthat can be launched by stroking 8.
4. This launcher uses stroke dialing to quickly navigate andlaunch applications.
5. With the launch of the Accessibility API in Android1.6, and the accompanying Open Source TalkBack screenreader,I can now launch any Android application, e.g., GoogleMaps or YouTube.
6. TalkBack provides spoken feedback for native Androidapplications, including the settings menu.
7. You can use Android Market to install third-partyapplications, many of these work outof the box with TalkBack.

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

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

Date: 2009-03-30 Mon

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