Introduction to Accessibility Insights for Android

Welcome to Accessibility Insights tools that help developers find and fix accessibility issues. Accessibility Insights for Android lets you quickly test Android apps for common accessibility issues such as low contrast, missing names, or inadequate touch target sizes. In this video, you’ll learn how to run automated checks on an android app on a hardware or virtual device. This video shows a Windows computer but you can also run automated checks on a Mac or Linux computer and the steps are the same. This video assumes you’ve already installed the Accessibility Insights for Android application and service.

00:40 - Those steps are covered in a separate video available at accessibilityinsights.io To run automated checks, the first step is to connect your device. If you’re testing on a hardware device, connect it to your computer via USB. A confirmation message on your device will ask if you want to allow access to the devices data. Select allow. If you’re testing on a virtual device, go to Android Studio or the Android Virtual Device Manager, choose a virtual device, and select run.

01:13 - The second step is to configure port forwarding. On your computer, open a Command Prompt or Terminal session, and enter the following command: adb “space” forward “space” tcp:62442 “space” tcp:62442 The system will respond with the port number. The next step is to prepare your target app. Launch the app and navigate to the first screen you want to test. Now you’re ready to run automated checks. On your computer launch Accessibility Insights for Android.

01:50 - Under Android device port number enter 6 2 4 4 2. Then select Validate port number. After a moment your device and app will appear under Connected device. Select Start testing. The final step is to review the automated check results. The results are displayed in a new window. By default it shows the total number of failed instances, a list of the accessibility rules that were violated, the number of failed instances for each rule, and a screenshot of the target app with failed instances highlighted.

02:26 - Rules can be expanded to show information about their failed instances. You can use the Expand all button or expand a single rule by selecting it. Expanding a rule shows its failed instances in a list and highlights them in the screenshot. For each failed instance you can examine the class name of the element that failed and how to fix the issue. For some rules additional information is provided to help identify the element. Selecting a failed instance highlights it in the screenshot. The Visual helper toggle allows you to quickly show or hide the highlighting The Start over button runs automated checks on whatever content is currently visible on your connected device. Thank you for watching! Learn more about Accessibility Insights for Android at accessibilityinsights.io .