Background: When focused on a WebView control, TalkBack announces something to the effect of "Bing. WebView. Double tap and hold to long press" (note that focus is on the WebView control itself, not the content within the webview). However, as best I can tell, double tap and long pressing doesn't seem to do anything other than pass TalkBack focus into a control within the WebView itself. Our team has testers that specialize in accessibility which filed a bug on us for this "Double tap and hold to long press" announcement. The rationale within the bug states that since this action doesn't appear to do anything, the announcement will only serve to confuse TalkBack users.
This announcement doesn't appear to be specific to our app as I was able to reproduce this behavior on a new, blank Android app with a WebView that points to Google (there it announces "Google. WebView. Double tap and hold to long press"). As I think it helps show what focus I'm talking about, I have added a screenshot of the prototype app I built with the green TalkBack focus indicator below:
Questions:
- Is there a reason for why Android insists on announcing the "double tap and hold to long press" piece for a WebView? If there is a functional reason for this, then any attempt to fix this issue may be moot.
- Does anyone know of a way to stop TalkBack from reading the "double tap and long press"? Alternatively, is there a way to hide the WebView control itself from TalkBack without hiding the html content within?
What I've tried: Unfortunately saw no luck setting isLongClickable to false, setting empty onLongClickListeners, and worked with a few of the suggestions in the stackoverflows here, here, here, and here. I tried all of the mentioned changes on a blank app to reduce the possibility that the complexities of our production app has interfered with the experiments I was running. Setting the ImportantForAccessibility field to "No" hides all of the inner html of the webview from Talkback so that is not an option either.
Sidenote that I find interesting: in my experimentation, I also tried setting the WebView's isClickable property to false and yet it was still clickable. So I am wondering if I am possibly focusing on setting properties on the wrong control (or if Android just completely ignores those properties on a WebView control).
