Accessibility
TalkBack support, gesture pass-through, and options that make typing easier.
The Accessibility screen gathers the options into four groups: vision, motion, screen reader and touch. Turn on only what you need, whether that’s a colour filter, a screen-reader mode or a slower press-and-hold delay. Two related settings live on their own screens, key size on Layout & size and feedback on Key press, and this screen has a link straight to each.
Typing with a screen reader
Section titled “Typing with a screen reader”TalkBack support has four modes. Each one changes how a key responds to your touch, as well as what gets spoken:
- Off. Keys carry no spoken label at all. As far as a screen reader is concerned, the keyboard is invisible.
- Labels. Every key gets a spoken name, punctuation included (
.reads as “period”,@as “at sign”, and so on through the symbol set). Typing still happens by direct touch. Use this mode if you turn a screen reader on only occasionally, or if you drive the keyboard with switch access instead of touch. - Explore. The standard screen-reader keyboard pattern. Slide your finger across the keys to hear each one, then double-tap to type it (or lift, depending on your screen reader). This changes behavior only while a screen reader is running touch exploration. With none running, the keyboard types normally either way.
- Gestures. Keeps the keyboard’s own touch handling active even while a screen reader runs, so the Space cursor slide, the ⌫ word-swipe, glide typing and handwriting all keep working. Each key still announces itself when you touch it, and types only when you lift your finger. This mode needs the pass-through service described below. Without that service it behaves exactly like Explore.
The gesture pass-through service
Section titled “The gesture pass-through service”Setting TalkBack support to Gestures reveals an extra row asking you to turn on the “WM Keyboard gestures” accessibility service, and the mode falls back to Explore-by-touch behavior until you do.
This service is deliberately narrow. It requests no accessibility events and can’t read anything on screen. Its only job is to tell Android to route touches on the key grid straight to the keyboard, instead of through the screen reader’s touch exploration. The carve-out covers the key grid alone. The suggestion strip, the toolbar and every panel stay explorable by your screen reader as usual, as does the rest of the device. The service never turns touch exploration on by itself, and it takes effect only while a screen reader you already enabled is exploring by touch.
Tap that row. A disclosure sheet explains what the service does and what it can’t do. Tap Open system settings on it to reach Android’s own Accessibility screen, then turn the service on there like any other. Turning it back off is safe at any time, as is leaving it off. The keyboard falls back to Explore-by-touch for as long as TalkBack support is set to Gestures.
Seeing the keys clearly
Section titled “Seeing the keys clearly”Colour vision applies a real-time correction, not a simulation, for red-green and blue-yellow colour blindness. Deutan and Protan cover the two red-green types, and deuteranopia is by far the more common of them. Tritan covers the blue-yellow type. Grey removes colour from the keyboard entirely. The filter reshuffles the keyboard’s palette so hues that would otherwise collapse into each other stay distinguishable. It runs after your theme resolves, so it works the same way over a built-in theme, a custom theme, or dynamic colour.
High contrast keys replaces your theme’s key and board colors with a flat black-or-white pair, and forces every label to the opposite extreme. Any gradient, background image or animation is dropped while it’s active, and so are a theme’s own suggestion strip and navigation bar fills, since those two bars have to take the flat board for the label contrast to hold. Your theme’s accent color is kept, so Shift and an active toolbar tool still stand out against the flat board. If your theme’s key shape is None, the keys come back as plain rounded ones while this is on.
Key outlines draws a border around every key, and around the background behind every toolbar tool. It helps when a key’s fill and the board sit close in brightness, as on a translucent theme or one carrying a background image. A theme that already defines its own key border or tool outline keeps what it has. If the key shape is None, the keys come back as rounded ones while this is on, so there’s an edge to outline. Tools are skipped when their background is switched off (tool circle radius at 0), because there’s nothing there to outline.
Bold key labels thickens the letters drawn on each key.
Readable font is a one-tap shortcut to Atkinson Hyperlegible, a typeface the Braille Institute designed to keep easily-confused characters visually distinct: capital I, lowercase l and the digit 1, or capital O and zero. Turning it off restores the keyboard’s default font. To pick a different face entirely, or import your own, use the Keyboard font row below it. That row opens the same font browser covered in Fonts.
Text size scales the labels on the keys from 70% to 200% of normal, defaulting to 100%. It affects the glyphs only. To make the keys themselves bigger, use Size, position & one-handed use instead.
Reducing motion
Section titled “Reducing motion”Reduce motion turns off the toolbar’s sliding and scaling transitions, animated theme backgrounds, the blinking text cursor, the microphone’s pulse ring while dictating, and the transitions inside the settings app itself — including the way a row, a theme card or a photo tile grows into the screen it opens. With it on, the screen simply appears. On the keyboard it also stills the smaller motions: a panel (emoji, clipboard, a tool) fading in, the emoji tab bar sliding to the tab you tap, the long-press popup growing out of its key, the board sliding into and out of one-handed mode, the floating keyboard fading up, and clips and snippets gliding into place as you pin or delete them. The same goes for the settings app’s smaller motions: rows fading and sliding into place as you add or delete them, a spinner fading into the button it was waiting on, the ring and tick moving to the theme card you pick, and the statistics, storage and network activity charts growing in. With Reduce motion on, each of these happens at once.
It deliberately leaves in place any feedback that tells you something: the key-preview bubble, the pressed-key color, the glide-typing trail. Removing those would make the keyboard harder to use, not easier. The cursor and microphone ring stay visible. They just hold still instead of animating.
Power saving mode can turn this same behavior on as a side effect of its own “Animations” toggle, in its “Effects to drop” group. Motion can therefore end up reduced even if you never touched this toggle yourself. Check there too if you’re expecting animation and not seeing it.
The keyboard also follows the device’s own Remove animations (Android’s Accessibility screen, or Animator duration scale in developer options). While that is on, the keyboard behaves as if Reduce motion were on, and it writes nothing to this switch. Turn the system setting back off and your own choice returns untouched.
Plain settings rows
Section titled “Plain settings rows”Every setting in the settings app has a coloured icon beside its name, down to the colours and sliders in the theme editor and the rows of the layout editor, and every screen heading has one too. Lists of your own things, such as languages, layouts, words and packs, go without, since one icon repeated down a list would say nothing its names do not. Turn off Icons in settings for plain rows that show only words, as in earlier versions of the app. Some people find a list of words easier to scan than a column of coloured icons.
When you flip the switch, the icons on the Accessibility screen shrink away (or grow back) and the words slide over to fill the space. Every other screen simply opens in the new style. With Reduce motion on, the change happens at once.
This changes only the settings app. The keyboard, its toolbar and the Tools list keep their icons, because there an icon is how you tell one tool from another.
Faster settings screens
Section titled “Faster settings screens”When you open a setting, its icon and name move up into the heading of the screen it opens. That motion costs more than it looks: while it’s on, every settings screen is laid out twice each time anything on it changes, and a slower phone can show that as a stutter when a screen opens or scrolls. Turn off Screen transitions and screens open with the plain sideways slide instead, laid out once.
It’s on by default, and a phone that runs the settings smoothly has no reason to turn it off. Reduce motion already turns these transitions off, so with that on this switch changes nothing. The keyboard itself isn’t affected either way.
Touch accommodations
Section titled “Touch accommodations”Ignore repeated presses discards a second press of the same key when it lands inside a window after the first. The window runs from 0 ms (off, so every press registers) up to 500 ms, and defaults to off. It’s aimed at hand tremor or spasticity, where one intended tap shouldn’t turn into two characters. Only a repeat of the same key is filtered, so typing two different keys quickly is never blocked. Set the window too high and it starts eating deliberate double letters like “ll” or “ee”.
Press and hold delay controls how long you hold a key before its alternate-character popup opens, from 100 ms up to 800 ms, defaulting to 300 ms. Raise it if you trigger the popups by accident. Lower it if holding a key feels sluggish.
Two links round out the group. Key size and spacing opens Size, position & one-handed use for taller keys and wider gaps. Haptics and sound opens the Key press screen, covered on Sound & vibration, for feedback on every press.
One-handed and floating keyboards
Section titled “One-handed and floating keyboards”Shrinking or repositioning the keyboard is also a motor-accessibility tool, even though the controls live on the Layout & size screen rather than here. One-handed mode shrinks the whole keyboard toward the left or right edge, and it’s off by default. Portrait and landscape each keep their own width and height. Portrait defaults to 78% width and landscape to 55%, both at 100% height, docked to the right. Landscape starts narrower because a landscape keyboard is wide enough that 78% would barely help. A floating keyboard detaches into a resizable, draggable panel instead, starting at 320dp wide. Split keyboard pushes the two halves apart with a gap between them, for two-thumb reach on a wide screen.
Full detail on all three, plus their sliders, lives on Size, position & one-handed use.
Details and edge cases
Section titled “Details and edge cases”- Explore and Gestures only change anything while a screen reader is actually running. With TalkBack (or another screen reader) off, all four TalkBack support modes type the same way, by direct touch. Leaving it on Gestures costs you nothing day to day.
- The pass-through service reads nothing. It requests zero accessibility event types and never inspects screen content. Its one capability is redirecting touches on the key grid, and only while another accessibility service is already exploring by touch.
- Colour vision correction, not simulation. It doesn’t show you what a colour-blind person sees. It adjusts the keyboard’s own colours so a colour-blind person can tell them apart.
- High contrast keys overrides the active theme’s colours while it’s on, including gradients, background images and animation. Turning it off restores the theme exactly as it was.
- Text size here is separate from the key-preview popup’s font scale. Scaling one doesn’t scale the other.
- Ignore repeated presses only ever blocks a repeat of the same key. It can’t slow down typing by blocking different keys pressed close together.
- Reduced motion can be on even if you never touched the toggle. Two things switch it on from outside: Power saving mode dropping animations, and the device’s own Remove animations setting. Neither one writes to the Reduce motion switch, so turning either off gives you your own choice back.