This is a plea for Google to improve TalkBack, especially for non-blind users, or at least offer options that users would benefit from, and fix some major bugs.
If you've never used TalkBack, it's pretty danged useful:
* Meant for blind users but useful to anyone who'd like their phone to read something to them (in the car, while you're making coffee in the morning, etc).
* Can be set so tapping the Home button 3 times switches it on, from any app.
* Can be set so violently shaking the phone reads everything on screen, like an entire webpage. If it's super long like a Kindle book, it will surprisingly just keep reading to you - entire books if you like.
* If you've never used it before, it's in Settings > Accessibility > Vision > Talkback
Super useful, right?
It would be if it didn't constantly screw up:
* There's no way to tell it to really really keep reading. Leaving the screen on wastes battery, yet pressing the Power button will, 90% of the time, stop it from talking.
* Resuming talking from where you left off is usually between difficult and impossible.
* Because it's designed for the blind it's practically unusable in a driving scenario, because instead of one-finger swipe to scroll, one tap to do something, it's 2-finger swipe to scroll (good luck doing that one-handed), and tap once to hear where you are, then double-tap to perform the action. This would all be fine if it was something you could get out of the way before you start the drive but the above issue where it just stops talking constantly means that almost never happens.
* On many webpages, if you tap a paragraph of text it will read just that paragraph to you, not the entire article. Why anyone would want just the one out of context, who knows. But that's what it assumes you want: What no one wants. If you give it the violent shake for longer reading and it stops (for example the screen turned off on its own), often the webpage will leap to the top when you return to it for some reason, and you can't restart reading without hearing the whole article over. If it's a long article, throwing the phone out the window becomes a more desirable path.
And here's the worst part:
* No one talks about TalkBack. If you google any of these issues you just get Google's useless Support page that tells you what the Options screen already tells you, and a thousand users confused about what this TalkBack thing is desperate to turn it off or remove it from their phones entirely. Getting answers to how to make it work better seems impossible.
Please improve TalkBack!
If you've never used TalkBack, it's pretty danged useful:
* Meant for blind users but useful to anyone who'd like their phone to read something to them (in the car, while you're making coffee in the morning, etc).
* Can be set so tapping the Home button 3 times switches it on, from any app.
* Can be set so violently shaking the phone reads everything on screen, like an entire webpage. If it's super long like a Kindle book, it will surprisingly just keep reading to you - entire books if you like.
* If you've never used it before, it's in Settings > Accessibility > Vision > Talkback
Super useful, right?
It would be if it didn't constantly screw up:
* There's no way to tell it to really really keep reading. Leaving the screen on wastes battery, yet pressing the Power button will, 90% of the time, stop it from talking.
* Resuming talking from where you left off is usually between difficult and impossible.
* Because it's designed for the blind it's practically unusable in a driving scenario, because instead of one-finger swipe to scroll, one tap to do something, it's 2-finger swipe to scroll (good luck doing that one-handed), and tap once to hear where you are, then double-tap to perform the action. This would all be fine if it was something you could get out of the way before you start the drive but the above issue where it just stops talking constantly means that almost never happens.
* On many webpages, if you tap a paragraph of text it will read just that paragraph to you, not the entire article. Why anyone would want just the one out of context, who knows. But that's what it assumes you want: What no one wants. If you give it the violent shake for longer reading and it stops (for example the screen turned off on its own), often the webpage will leap to the top when you return to it for some reason, and you can't restart reading without hearing the whole article over. If it's a long article, throwing the phone out the window becomes a more desirable path.
And here's the worst part:
* No one talks about TalkBack. If you google any of these issues you just get Google's useless Support page that tells you what the Options screen already tells you, and a thousand users confused about what this TalkBack thing is desperate to turn it off or remove it from their phones entirely. Getting answers to how to make it work better seems impossible.
Please improve TalkBack!
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