How to change Android Talkback in case of App name

Question

The App I am working on has a name which is mispronounced by the talkback. I am able to fix this within the app by changing the spelling. But if I change the spelling in the android:label in the manifest, it is misspelled on the app icon on the phone. Does anyone have a way around this?

Answer 1

There is no way to do this. The fix would be for the LaunchScreen to have the ability to read an alternative label, and place it in the content description for the textView that represents your application.

TalkBack reads back things like this.

• If a contentDescription is available this is read off.
• If the view has "text" this is read off.
• All other cases the view is not accessibility focused.

So, what is happening is TalkBack is grabbing onto the "text" of your view as provided by the name of the application. The Launch Screen does not provide a mechanism for overriding the contentDescription, and therefore will only ever read your text. This isn't a problem with your app, it is a problem with the Home Screen app. You may be able to fix this for users with different Home Screen apps, but there is absolutely no universal solution, and certainly no solution for the standard LaunchScreen application provided on stock Motorola, Samsung, and Nexus devices (most likely others as well, but I don't own any of them).

Answer 2

In the case that talkback is not pronouncing an acronym correctly, attempting to read it as a word rather than individual letters, you can use zero-width non-breaking space characters \ufeff to separate the letters invisibly.

Suppose you have the word CAT but you want it pronounced C.A.T.:

<string name="app_name">C\ufeffA\ufeffT</string>

It will still appear as CAT and won't be broken for line-wrapping.

However, your users will not be able to search for the app by typing CAT anymore.