Spot on, actually. The problem was that with Talkback turned out, scrolling was virtually impossible. This became painfully relevant when I attempted to find "Accessibility Settings." The Settings screen showed me the first 11 of 27 entries, but when I tried to swipe to scroll down, the Talkback feature intervened and told me where I happened to land my finger on the screen. I quickly realized that I could not scroll at all, not in the usual way.
I finally discovered that I could get the thing to flip to the next 11 entries by making the highlighted line scroll down by 1 at a time. Don't ask me how that was different, but I did manage to get it to jump one line at a time by flicking my finger over the screen, and by making it jump down after highlighting the 11th item, I got it to display the next screen full of options. Of course, "Accessibility Settings" wasn't in that group, either, so I had scroll 1 line at a time another 12 times to get it to shift downward one more time. And there, with the last 5 entries in the Settings menu displayed, I found "Accessibility Settings." I selected by double-tapping (Talkback told me "Accessibility Settings" out loud when I single-tapped,) disabled Talkback... and voila! I had a working phone!
I do need to write to Motorola and find out why on earth they would ever devise such a torture for their phones, let alone enable it for any phone right out of the box. Of course, I bought the phone used, so possibly the previous owner did this to torture whoever was unlucky enough to snap up his used equipment. But the crisis is over. And with Talkback disabled, I actually like the phone.
Thanks for your help.
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