Android O

Few notes on Android O.

Generally so far this looks like a typical annual update, usual array of minor annoyances (few things that have had their permissions reworked) / perks (less terrible system for managing shortcuts), but Google made three big changes to accessibility that (assuming they turn out to be reasonably well implemented / supported / bug-free) could make life dramatically better for fans of Screen Reader:

1. We can now add a dedicated Pleco button to the bottom software navigation bar; sadly won't help most Samsung users, but people who buy from a phone vendor not still clinging to design standards Google abandoned in Android 5 will benefit at least.
2. We can also now trigger Screen Reader on a fingerprint sensor gesture (slide your finger down or up over the sensor, e.g.).
3. Most exciting of all, there's a new feature that promises to give us exact character locations instead of just big blocks of text. Assuming it works well (and that's always a big assumption with stuff like this), we should now be able to give you results from Screen Reader that are essentially indistinguishable from Screen OCR in terms of positional accuracy, i.e. our characters exactly overlay those in the original app just as they do in OCR. This also opens up the tantalizing possibility of using Screen Reader + OCR simultaneously, i.e., we recognize all of the text on the screen with OCR, replace the OCRed characters with the Reader'ed characters where we can find them but then keep the OCR characters from images or places the accessibility system missed or whatever.

Also, not quite as significant now that we're about to launch two new non-Google-dependent Cantonese TTS voices, but it looks like the Android text-to-speech system has finally added support for tracking along with the text it reads out loud word-by-word (as iOS has supported since iOS 7), so when using free built-in TTS we should now be able to offer word-by-word instead of sentence-by-sentence highlighting.

Oh, also, people who've been lobbying for years and years for us to do an Android-specific icon may finally get their wish, as the new adaptive icons system looks really cool but would seem to require something with multiple layers and shadows.