This guide provides best practices for accessibility on Android TV and provides recommendations for both native and non-native apps.
Why is accessibility important for my TV app?
Vision impairments are not uncommon among the TV-watching population. An estimated 2.2 billion people globally have a vision impairment, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). In the US alone, 32 million Americans 18 and older have experienced significant vision loss, according to the 2018 National Health Interview Survey. In Europe, the estimates point to 30 million blind and partially sighted persons, according to the European Blind Union (EBU).
Most importantly, users with vision impairments enjoy consuming media content just as much as their fully sighted peers. A 2017 survey commissioned by Comcast (US) showed that 96% of users who are blind or have low vision regularly watch TV, with 81% watching more than an hour per day. However, 65% also reported encountering problems with looking up what’s on TV and in a 2020 survey in the UK, 80% of disabled people said they had experienced accessibility issues with video on-demand streaming services.
While assistive technologies can and do help users with low vision, it's important to support accessibility in content discovery journeys for TV apps by, for example, paying extra attention to providing navigation guidance and properly labeling elements. Ensuring that TV apps work well with accessibility features like TalkBack has the power to significantly improve the experience for users with vision impairments.
The first step towards improving accessibility is awareness. This guide can help you and your team to uncover accessibility issues with your app on TV.
Android accessibility resources
To learn more about accessibility on Android, see our accessibility development resources.
Text scaling
Android TV apps should respect the user's preference for text scaling by supporting different pixel densities.
Take special care to:
- Use
wrap_contentfor dimensions in UI components. - Ensure that layouts rearrange components as their dimensions change depending on the text scale.
- Ensure that components still fit on the screen at larger text scales.
- Change text size units for components that are not flexible (do not use sp).
Check the value of
FONT_SCALEfor adjustment in custom views:// Checking font scale with Context val scale = resources.configuration.fontScale Log.d(TAG, "Text scale is: " + scale)
The text scale can be easily changed with the following command:
adb shell settings put system font_scale 1.2f
On Android 12 and above, users are able to alter the text scaling from the device settings.