Notifications:  They tell me when I’ve missed a call, gotten an Email, received a text message and so so much more.  Notifications have become a critical part of how I work and play and without them, I sometimes wonder if I’d know where to begin.

The Lock Screen

On iOS, the first way I likely  encounter notifications is on my lock screen.  Quite simply, when I wake my phone, notifications show on my lock screen in the order received, oldest to newest.  So, when I wake up in the morning, or come out of a meeting and grab my phone, I can quickly skim through whatever notifications I’ve missed over night.  On Android, the experience is very different.  First, my lock screen shows notifications, however, they do not seem ordered in any particular way.  For example, looking at my lock screen right now, I see a FaceBook notification that came in an hour ago followed by a Skype notification telling me about a message I received three minutes ago.  Next to both of these notifications, I have an “expand” button which, if activated, will show me additional notifications from that application.  Put another way, the notifications seem to be grouped even if the groups themselves don’t seem ordered in any particular method.  On the one hand this grouping thing is kind of neat as I can quickly see the apps that have sent me notifications and, if I’m interested in the particulars of any, I can expand them.  The problem is that this too doesn’t seem standardized between applications:  Some applications group notifications as just described, others don’t.  In addition, some applications have a specific button that says “expand” to which I can swipe and others require me to tap on the notification itself and go on faith that it will expand to show additional content.  Others say “dismissable” although I haven’t figured out how to actually dismiss them.  Much as I like the concept of grouped notifications, the inconsistencies I’ve observed so far make it more confusing than anything else.  One cool thing that Android seems to have on the lock screen though is this thing I’m calling the notification summary bar.  If I explore by touch, moving upward from the bottom of the lock screen, I encounter a line that, when touched, reads a number followed by a detailed listing of all my notifications.  I’m not sure what this looks like visually as there’s just no way all the content that gets read aloud would fit on the lock screen, let alone a single line.  Still, it’s a good way to quickly get an overview of all notifications.

Notification Center and the Notification Shade

Both iOS and Android have a way to display notifications once the device is unlocked, iOS calls this the notification center and Android (at least TalkBack) calls this the Notification Shade.  On iOS, the Notification Center is opened by using a three-finger swipe down gesture from the top status bar.  On Android, there are two ways to access the Notification Shade, either a TalkBack-specific swipe right then down gesture, or a two-finger swipe down from top gesture.  I’m improving, however in the beginning, it was a bit challenging for me to perform either of these gestures reliably.  When the Notification Shade is activated, I first encounter the time followed by my WIFI status and a control to disable WIFI, then my cellular signal status, then my battery status, then my Bluetooth status, then my screen orientation, and then my notifications.  While this is quite a bit to have to go through, having a sort of quick control center easily available is neat.  As with the lock screen, notifications are grouped, or at least they attempt to be and like the lock screen, the grouping doesn’t seem consistent.  On the shade, I have a GMail notification that says “nine more notifications inside”.  Other notifications though don’t tell me how much additional content they may or may not include and I only know they are expandable as they are followed by a button that says “expand.”  This button isn’t programmatically associated with the notification though, so unless I swipe through this shade, I’m not sure which notifications are associated with buttons to expand additional content.  The Notification Shade also contains a few details that don’t appear on my lock screen, one is my local weather and another is an Android notification advising me that I can enable the ability to unlock my phone with my voice.  While it doesn’t really bother me, the weather appearing here is a bit incongruous with the other types of notifications present.  At the very end of the Notification Shade is an unlabeled button which I’ve discovered is a clear all notifications button of some sort.  I know it’s possible to clear all notifications on iOS if using an iDevice with 3D touch, however, this seemingly simple and logical feature has existed on Android for a long time now and it could almost be fantastic.  I say almost because, when I activate this button, my phone starts going crazy and counting down messages while playing a notification tone, “82 messages 81 messages 80 messages 79 messages 78 messages …” and a tone for each one.  I’ve discovered that if I lock my screen at this point, the countdown seems to proceed much faster, probably because TalkBack isn’t trying to read the number of messages.  I really have no idea why this is happening, but while the clear all notifications feature is a good one, I definitely hesitate before using it.

Sounds, vibrations and other observations

One of the more baffling things I’ve noticed about notification sounds on Android is that, at least on the devices I’ve tried, they always play through both the headphones (assuming headphones are plugged in) and the phone’s speaker.  So, let’s say I’m in a meeting and I decide to have a text conversation with someone — strictly a hypothetical situation in case my boss happens to be reading this blog post. 🙂  I plug headphones in and send a text.  When I receive an answer though, the notification sound is played through both the headphones and the phone’s speaker.  I can set my notification alerts to vibrate only and solve this problem, but it still strikes me as odd that I can’t make notification sounds play strictly through headphones.  Conversely, if I’m on a call, phone/Skype/WebEx/other, I don’t hear any notification sounds at all.  Presumably the thinking here is that I wouldn’t want my call interrupted with additional sounds being played, however, I find those notification sounds very helpful for determining the notification I just received.  If I get a notification while on a call, indicated by a vibration, the only thing I can do is open the Notification Shade and hope that the most recent notification is on top, or at least not grouped with other notifications.  In reality, this has proven extremely problematic for me, almost to the point of being a complete deal breaker.  Part of the reason this doesn’t work as smoothly as it possibly could is because TalkBack forces me to make a very difficult choice; whether notifications should be read aloud when the phone’s screen is locked.  If I enable this feature, all my notifications get read aloud when the screen is locked including sensitive content such as text messages, Hangouts conversations and so forth.  If I disable this feature, TalkBack stays quiet when notifications appear on the lock screen, however, as the screen automatically locks after a short period of time when on a call, this means nothing gets read which isn’t helpful since I don’t get the sounds in the call scenario either.  But let’s push that entire mess to the side for just a moment and talk a little about notification sounds themselves.  One of the really cool things about Android is that many apps allow their notification sound to be customized.  This means that unlike in iOS where many applications use the default iOS tri-tone notification default sound, Android applications allow the user to pick from whatever text/notification sounds exist on the device.  This is one feature I absolutely love, at least I would if Android would stop resetting certain sounds to the default sound.  For example, I configured my device to play one notification sound when receiving work Email and another sound when receiving personal Email.  That worked fantastic for three days or so, but now I’m getting the default notification sound regardless of whether Email is received on my work or personal accounts.  Other apps which have unique notification sounds on iOS don’t seem to have any unique sounds on Android, either that, or they do have the same unique sounds, but the default notification sound is being played for reasons I can’t explain.  For example, there’s an accessible dice game called Dice World which has a notification sound of dice rolling when an opponent has played their turn.  Initially, this sound would play just fine on my device, but now, I just get the standard notification sound and don’t seem able to change it.  Quick side note:  Yes, I do have the “play notification sound” enabled in Dice World.  Same situation with Tweetings, a very powerful Twitter client that has built-in notification sounds that initially played, but which now no longer do.  Point here is that the ability to customize notification sounds is extremely powerful, but I’m not sure how stable it is.  In addition, not all apps allow notification sounds to be customized in the first place.

As I wrap up this blog post, I’m left with the feeling that I’m barely scratching the surface of Android notifications.  I say this because I’ve gotten feedback on Twitter and elsewhere that others are not having the same experiences as me.  For example, some people claim to have an edit button on their Notification Shade which allows them to specify how notifications get sorted while others do not.  I’m also not sure if anyone else is experiencing the same inconsistencies as me with regard to notification sound preferences resetting themselves to default.  In the end though, I remain confident that I can find workable solutions to these challenges, how difficult those solutions may be to implement remains to be seen.

I wanted to write about something which Android folks probably take incredibly for granted, but which might be a bit perplexing to users coming from iOS.  And it’s one of these things that, as I write it, seems incredibly silly yet it’s really not.  In fact, it’s one of those twist of irony things that make Android an attractive option in the first place.  First some background.

As written previously, I’ve been learning on a Motorola G4 Play which I picked up on Amazon Prime for around $149.  I really love this particular device, it’s small, it’s light-weight, texture wise it’s easy to grip, and you just can’t beat the cost.  Still, one thing that’s been frustrating me is that occasionally, when I double tap something, the phone doesn’t register a double tap.  In addition, I find that sometimes I’ll swipe my finger from left to right and yet the phone will act as if I hadn’t swiped at all.  I was complaining about this to a friend of mine, David, one night.

“gosh,” I complained, “how can anyone take Android seriously when it can’t even reliably recognize a swipe gesture?””

After a bit of a pause, David cautiously replied, “do you think it could possibly be your hardware?”

Honestly, in my frustration, I hadn’t even considered the hardware angle and how that might have a real functional impact on things like gesture recognition.  But it stands to reason that the hardware differences between my $149 Moto G4 Play and David’s $649 Pixel just might be a factor somehow.

Going down the rabbit hole

I wanted to get an idea of just how much of a difference different hardware configurations might make, especially in terms of device accessibility.  Obviously devices with faster processors and more RAM are going to perform at greater speeds, but what about touch screen sensitivity, ROM customizations and anything else that might impact accessibility?

I started out by purchasing an Asus ZenFone 3 Laser because not only is its metal construction extremely solid, but, well, it just has a really awesome name.  OK all that is true, but I really bought it because it has a larger display, more RAM and a slightly faster processor than my Moto G4 Play.  After getting through the setup process, I was introduced to what Asus calls ZenUI 3.0.  ZenUI is basically the Asus customization of Android including a number of applications and widgets, a redesigned home screen, customized dialer, custom sound effects for things like locking and unlocking the screen, and notifications and other tweaks to make their phone unique.  Coming from iOS, the idea that the entire home screen, notifications and even the phone dialer can be customized is very unsettling.  After all, if I talk to another iPhone user, I can walk them through how to place a call because I do it exactly the same way on my own device.  The asus customizations, however, were so significant that I was unable to figure out how to access my menu of applications.  I want to be clear here, I’m not saying necessarily that finding the application menu is inaccessible, it just wasn’t at all intuitive and definitely wasn’t the same experience as on my Moto G4 Play.  What I soon learned though is that Android allows for the installation of what are known as Launchers.  My understanding thus far is that Launchers basically define things like the home screen layout.  After installing the Google Now Launcher, which is apparently installed by default on my G4 Play,my application menu appeared where I was expecting it and some of the other random dialogs that had started popping up simply went away.  In the end, I experienced similar frustrations to those I had been facing with the G4 Play with the additional frustrations of figuring out how to get my home screen and other aspects into a state where I could use them.  As awesome as its name is, the ZenFone soon found its way back to the store.

Next up, I purchased a Blu 5R which is also a solidly built phone — yeah, I tend to gravitate toward phones that are solid, heavy and which feel like they won’t fall apart at the drop of a hat.  As with the Asus model that I returned, the Blu phone has a larger screen and slightly better specs than my G4 Play.  While the Blu had its share of customizations, such as rather cute startup and shutdown sounds and a number of pre-installed applications, my experience was a very positive one.  Although not perfect, I experienced fewer issues with gesture recognition, I loved the finger print sensor (the G4 Play doesn’t have this) and the speaker, once I realized it was initially covered over by a sticker, is really fantastic.  If anyone reading this is looking for a budget entry-level phone, the Blu 5R should definitely be considered.  I wound up returning mine, but only because I couldn’t justify it given that I already own the G4 Play.

And so it was with great anticipation that I awaited the arrival of my latest phone from somewhere in China, the OnePlus 3T.  I’d never heard of the company, OnePlus, but they are a startup specializing in high-end, high-performance devices at mid-level prices.  The specifications of the OnePlus 3T rival those of the Nexus at just over half the price and the reviews are fantastic.  If I decide to seriously make the switch to Android, the 3T, with it’s super fast battery charging capability, 6 GB of RAM, convenient slider to quickly enable do-not-disturb and amazing form-factor is a device I could see myself using day-to-day.  More importantly though, gestures are definitely recognized, accurately and consistently.

What have I learned?

I’ve actually learned a lot over these past few weeks, beyond the fact that my local electronics shop has a really great return policy.  First, when purchasing a new Android device or when seeking assistance, it’s important to remember that Android devices can be different, sometimes vastly so.  If you’re coming from iOS, this is extremely important because for the most part, iOS devices and how they operate are pretty similar across the board.  Another thing I learned is that when an Android user says, “hmm, I’m not experiencing that issue,” it could really mean that, given their specific hardware/software which may be different than yours, they’re really not experiencing the same issue as that which you may be experiencing.  It’s been my experience that sometimes, when an iOS user says that they’re not experiencing an issue, it’s meant as a mild rebuke:  something along the lines of, “I’ve got the same hardware as you, I’ve got the same software as you, it’s working fine on my end, clearly it’s a problem on yours.”  Looking over this paragraph, I realize I’m over-using the word experience, but in a way, that’s exactly what we’re talking about here.  One of the very things that makes Android such an attractive option is the flexibility to customize just about every part of the experience.  This comes at a cost though, the cost being fragmentation between what I might experience and what you might experience.

One of the things that I’m most excited about with Android is that now, it’s possible to activate TalkBack when the device is first booted.  While folks today may take this for granted, this ability to be off and running right out of the box wasn’t always the case.  Back in the day, with my first Android device, I had to get sighted help to walk me through the initial setup and then had to have them help me get TalkBack from the Google store since it didn’t even come pre-installed.  So yes, I’m very excited that I can order an Android device, have it arrive and without assistance, can get the thing talking.

Hardware description

The Moto G4 Play is a very small device which feels like it’s made entirely out of plastic.  The device is very thin, thinner than my iPhone.  While the device appears to be all plastic, it also feels rugged.  On the right side of the device are two controls, the top most being the sleep/power button which contains tactile markings.  Below that is another somewhat long button which serves as the volume control.  The bottom edge of the device contains a micro-USB port for charging.  There are no controls at all on the left side of the device.  The top of the device contains a headphone jack.  Quick side note here, it’s actually taken me a while to get used to the headphone jack being on top of the device because for many years, Apple has positioned theirs on the bottom of the device.  Anyway, this brings us to the front of the device which has an ear piece on top followed by the touch screen.  At the bottom of the touch screen is a tiny tiny little hole.  I actually initially thought the screen was chipped or something, apparently, this hole is for the microphone.  Flipping the device over, the back is pretty nondescript except for the camera which does protrude a little.  The entire back of the device can actually be pealed away revealing a removable battery, a SIM slot and a micro-SD card slot.  To clarify, when I say that the back can be “pealed away”, I mean it quite literally.  Using a finger nail or something extremely thin, the back can literally be pried off the back of the device.  The plastic actually bends when doing this and I confess that when I did this for the first time, I was totally sure the device would not go back together again.  Having done this multiple times since, I continue to be amazed that the back does snap back into place with no ill effects other than my own slightly elevated heartbeat.

Getting this thing up and talking

One of the really neat things about many Android devices is that when they’re booted, the user gets a small vibration to indicate that something is happening.  Personally, I love this added bit of confirmation as I don’t have enough light perception to tell if the screen is on or not.  Anyway, after waiting a little while, i placed and held two fingers on the screen, this is the shortcut I was told would activate TalkBack.  And sure enough, after a few seconds, it did!  TalkBack helpfully launched a tutorial to help me learn its gestures and become more familiar with how I could navigate different types of objects on the screen such as edit boxes, lists, multi-page scrolling and so on.  The tutorial is broken up into small lessons each of which contain exercises that can be performed to make sure the user understands what’s going on; it is in one of these lessons that I encountered my first real problem.

A bit about TalkBack gestures

One of the things the initial TalkBack tutorial does is acquaint the user with the basic TalkBack gestures.  Coming from the perspective of an iOS user, some of these gestures seem weirdly complicated, like the swipe up then right to open the global TalkBack menu, or the swipe right then down to open the notification shade.  Still, my goal here is to learn and so I followed the directions given in the tutorial.  Eventually, I got to an exercise which focused on changing the reading level, the reading level meaning whether TalkBack should read line by line, word by word, character by character … you get the idea.  “Swipe up then swipe down,” said the tutorial, but this didn’t accomplish anything.  Well that’s not entirely true, what it did accomplish was getting TalkBack to read random things on the screen.  I tried this multiple times and try though I might, I could not get the reading level to change from its default.  Was I doing something wrong?  Maybe I’m not swiping up and then down straight enough?  Maybe a swipe means something slightly different in the Android world than it does in the iOS world?  The other thing I found myself doing at this point was slightly tilting the device.  This had the effect of causing the screen to change orientation between portrait and landscape modes.  Not a problem except in this instance where half of my up/down swipes were probably being interpreted as left/right swipes because of the change in screen orientation.  Eventually, I got frustrated enough to press the “next” button and continue on with the tutorial.  The next tutorial lesson tried to teach me about cursor movement, but guess what?  Yep, the cursor can also be moved by characters/words/lines/… and yep, I couldn’t make that work either.

Surviving the tutorial and beyond

Eventually, I “nexted” my way through the rest of the tutorial and reached the “finish” button.  Setup continued at this point and I was able to log into my Google account, answer questions about syncing, location sharing and eventually got a screen that told me I was ready to go.  Ready to go, but where?  I’m going to write a separate post detailing this next topic in more detail, but the thing I discovered is that the concept of a home screen like exists in iOS is not as cut and dry in Android.  I’ve learned that many “Launchers” exist for Android and that depending on which came bundled with the device, or which the user may have downloaded, one device’s home screen may not look at all like another.  I’ve had my device for a few weeks now and still cannot figure out any logic to its home screen.  What I have figured out though is that along the bottom edge of the touch screen, there are a few virtual buttons.  From left to right these buttons are: “back” “home” and to the far right, “overview”.  Just above the “home” button is an “applications” button which takes me into an alphabetized grid-view of the applications installed on my device.  Maybe there’s a more efficient way to access apps, especially those I frequently use, but for now, I rely on this alphabetized grid to find just about everything.  I figure: if it’s not in the grid, I probably don’t need it right?

Quick conclusions

• I really love that I can enable TalkBack right out of the box.  This means that I can impulsively order a $149 phone from Amazon Prime Now, have it delivered and start using it right out of the box.
• TalkBack has a really neat tutorial that helps me learn in a very structured way.  Each lesson provides detail on specific TalkBack-related tasks I may wish to accomplish and then provides me with exercises so that I can practice accomplishing them.
• I have no idea at this point how to change my reading level so that I can have TalkBack read word by word or line by line, I’m just stuck with the default for now.  The big problem I have with this is, well, the tutorial was pretty specific on how I should change from level to level and it just didn’t work.  Quick note: I’ve since solved this problem with a number of updates, I’ll get to that in a future post.
• I have a home screen that doesn’t make sense to me.  I’ve shown it to sighted folks who always respond the same, “huh, that doesn’t look like mine.”  Research has told me that I can change this by installing something called a Launcher, but I don’t know where to even begin with that yet.  In the meantime, I have this very nicely alphabetized grid which while not super efficient, does help me find everything I need to find.

More to come soon, so please stay tuned. 🙂

While I’ve been an iOS user for many years, I’ve always been very curious about Android.  Indeed, the openness of the platform and all that that entails speaks to my inner geek.  I first experimented with Android back in 2011 when Android 2.1 was all the rage because way back then, it was still possible to get phones like the T-Mobile G2 with physical keyboards and, as a serious texting and social media junkie, this appealed to me.  Eventually I drifted back to iOS until a few years later when I traded in my iPhone for a Samsung Galaxy S III.  The Galaxy served me well until Apple released Siri which I just had to have and so back to iOS I came.

Over the years, there’s been quite a bit of innovation happening in the Android accessibility space and while I do my best to keep up with it all, it’s hard to really understand it if I’m not using it.  That said, iOS is working just fine for me, so it’s hard for me to justify the cost of a high-end Android device like Google’s Pixel even though it admittedly does look pretty darn cool.  And so it came to pass that one day, while researching Motorola cable modems on Amazon Prime Now, I came across the Moto G4 Play which retails for around $149.  um… a quick note to my more juvenile readers, this model is the letter G followed by the number 4 followed by the word play, not the “foreplay” you immediately thought of when your speech synthesizer read this to you :).  Anyway, I realize that at this price point, this phone won’t be as capable as higher-end models, but for someone like me who is generally curious — wanting to see what’s out there — I thought this model might be a good place to start.

What I thought I’d do is write a series of articles chronicling my rediscovery of Android, so that others who might be thinking of giving it a try will have an idea of the types of things they might encounter.  I’m not looking to convince anyone that Android’s better than iOS or vice versa.  Also, as I write, keep in mind that I too am learning and discovering, so if you find I’m doing something wrong, or if I should be doing something a different way, please don’t hesitate to comment.

I’m excited to be rediscovering Android and hope you enjoy the journey with me.