Well you would fiddle, wouldn’t you! 😉
The screen reader feature as introduced in Firefox OS 1.3 is experimental – hence it is burried away in the developer settings. If you are not familiar with mobile screen readers you will find it difficult to turn it off once enabled, but it can be done if you learn a couple of new gestures. In 1.4, and beyond, the screen reader is more mature, easier to access and there is another way to toggle it on/off it using the volume up/down buttons.
tl;dr if you’ve just selected “screen reader” then double tap “screen reader” again to unselect it. If you have 1.4 use the volume key toggle explained below; If you’ve been tapping and swiping on 1.3 and gotton yourself into a right old mess then you need to navigate back to the “screen reader” option first. Do this by swiping right or left to move the selection rectangle and double tapping to drill down into the settings. This is similar to using Tab, Shift+Tab and Enter on a desktop. There may be scrolling bugs so sometimes you may find you can’t see the rectangle but the speech should tell you where it is (just like it supposed too).
So how DO you turn it off? Well first you have to realise that the screen reader is designed for people with no or very impared vision. These users need a different way of interacting with the device that gives clear feedback on were they are in the UI. Thus speech indicates selected items in the UI and taps and swipes work differently to avoid accidently activating the wrong thing.
For the main gestures you might like to think of the touchscreen with the screen reader enabled as being a separate trackpad so there is no direct relationship with where you touch and what is on the screen at that point . Gestures can occur anywhere on the touch surface as follows.
- Swipe left or right – selects the the next or previous item. One item is always selected and is shown with a focus rectangle drawn round it. This item is spoken about when it becomes selected.
- Double tap – activates the selected item, just as if you had tapped on it when the screen reader is inactive
Thus you can move to any item and activiate it using these 2 gestures. For example between list items, in and out of nested lists, between icons on the home screen or select a checkbox. Just look for the item with the rectangle round it to see what will happen when you double tap anywhere on the screen.
Other screen reader gestures include:
- Single press – selects item pressed. This alows random taps and provides orientation.
- 2 finger swipe – scrolls up/down or left/right
- Audio preview – press and hold, then move fingure around so each item under the finger is selected and spoken.
In Firefox OS 1.4 a new screen reader toggle on/off was introduced using the volume up and down buttons:
- Press volume up and volume down in succession 3 times (6 distinct presses).
- Get a voice prompt
- Press volume up and volume down in succession 3 times (6 distinct presses).
See bug 957674 for full details of this feature’s introduction.
[UPDATE 22/05/14] Marco Zehe added some screen reader operation notes to the MDN Firefox OS Developer Settings documentation
[Update 2014-05-30] Added audio preview details.
Hi i tried doing this on my flatfish tablet with no success please any help would be extremely helpful.
I suggest you pop on Mozilla #tcp or discourse to discuss it and others there can hep walk you through the options.
that did not work on the infocus tablet from the tcp program :/
So thats 2 people saying that. Perhaps a faulty build or hardware?
Can you lets us know via email, discourse or IRC what the build number is under device details?
if I could enter in settings app … or the notification center
i think it is a faulty build
Does the screen reader not work at all?
toggle on/off and the two-fingers swipe does not work
So with swipe and double tap you should be able to do anything, including disable the screen reader.
In a flame device double tab to activate and swipe is not working (ffos 1.4)
The double tab to activate works on buttons like close, cancel, and global actions like unlock and power off, but not to open apps.
Finally I did it, don’t know how but I think the problem is the focus, sometimes you are in a screen and the focus is nowhere and is not working, I’ll try to replicate to inform you the problem.
You may be on to something if there is a way to end up with focus somewhere other than on one of the icons in the middle of the home screen. In the Flatfish Tablet 1.4 the build had no Icons and so the screen reader would not operate on the home page. if you can reproduce you should file a bug – eg Bug 1018144.
On Firefox Open C, once I rebooted, I cannot swipe to the home screen with the settings button. Tried double fnger swipe and double tap on slide bar.
You should contact the Firefox OS folks on IRC #flame . see https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/Firefox_OS/Developer_phone_guide/Flame
I stupidly did the same thing on a Flame with 1.3. Enabling Accessibility mode in the dev options essentially screws the phone. Although the speech and swipe left / double tap to navigate in theory works, I cant get back to the Settings to turn it off. I am on the 1st screen with the Social, Games etc folders and can’t get the focus to the 2nd screen no matter what I do. And I can’t flash it either since there is a setting you have to change in the Settings first – right? Any ideas?
I’ll answer my own question here since I found out how: If you don’t care about your data (in my case the phone was new and I hardly had anything on there), then you can easily factory reset your phone to the recovery image (whatever it shipped with – in my case v1.3) without a computer or without all the hassle of using ADB and flashing – by simply holding down the Power button and the Volume Up button and pressing the Home button all at the same time for a few seconds until you see the “Thundersoft” graphic – then let go and you will get a menu which has “wipe data/factory reset” on it. Use the Volume Down button to move the cursor to select this item from the list and then press the power button to select it.
I strongly recommend you have it plugged in to a power source at the time or have a >50% battery before doing this. But this worked for me and obviously a factory reset got rid of the hugely buggy and annoying screen reader ON setting. I’m still not sure how you’d fix things if you did want to keep your data though…
Thanks for the update and glad to hear you fixed it. Yes Firefox OS devices usually have a recovery mode which is a simple Android OS partition with the menu you see. I had this on my ZTE One. The Flatfish tablet didn’t have it or any way to manually enter fastboot which made it very hard to recover. An update to the fastboot fixed that. You could probably recover without changing any data or settings by using fastboot to update all the .img files and not reset the user data, but there are risks if you change the img version such that the data layout is incorrect.
Hi Steve, the explanations on your site have been the most usful ones I have found in my several days long struggle to get rid of the accesiblility screen reader – right after the one giving me the hint I could have turned on the screen reader accidentially. I got a Geeksphone revolution with firefox os, 1.3 or 1.4, I am not sure.
Most of what you describe is working and since I know it I find it quite interesting to discover this using the device. Although using is not the right word, I’d better say playing with it. It does not alway seem logic to me and therfore my question.
Yesterday, once the two-finger-swiping technique worked, and I was so happy to finally see the setting app again. But then I could not open it with the double-tap technique you describe. This morning it’s the other way round: for the first time I am able to open the apps on the home screen, but I do not manage to swipe to the other screens. Inside the apps I cannot scroll down, neither.
Do you have an advice? That would be great! Thanks for helping!
Thanks for your kind words.
I’m not clear if you just turned off the screen reader and are still having problems or if you are playing with it? I’m not familiar with the Geeksphone but the important point is the screen reader in 1.3 and early 1.4 builds was very buggy. So it’s a good idea to think about upgrading your device (more thoughts below). If you don’t mind losing data a complete reset should help as it will turn off the screen reader. That’s usually done by accessing the recovery menu using a combination of power button and volume key. Another way is to connect your phone to a PC and use the ‘adb shell wipe data’ command.
If your phone does not get over the air updates (or the latest is still old) you can flash the phone yourself. If images are available for your phone that is fairly straight forward. If not, you will have to borrow some or build them yourself (requires a Linux PC). The best thing is to look at the information on MDN and contact people on IRC (#b2g) or perhaps stackoverflow (see blue box at foot of the Firefox OS MDN page. It looks like the MDN Geeksphone page has it covered.
Hi Steve, when I first wrote I had not managed to turn the screenreader off. It still took me several days more. Thanks to your explanations I started to understand how the screenreader works. Maybe its because the system is so buggy, but some things wouldn’t work, although I did well. E.g changing the screens or scrolling… By continuously trying everyday I managed to get closer to settings. In the end I managed to get there and could turn the screenreader off.
Yippiehhhh!!
I cannot give to others a definitive advice on how I did. If anybody has the same problem, I can just say: be patient and try the same things again and again, then you will manage it without a complete reset.
All the best and thanks again!
Thanks for the update and it’s great to hear you finally triumphed.
Marco Zehe of Mozilla a11y team posted this early introductory video about the Screen reader – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNWcCCddSm8
More up-to-date details and videos on the mozilla wiki – https://wiki.mozilla.org/Accessibility/Mobile/ScreenReader
Thank you very much, bro. Your article helps me a lot for turning off the Screen Reader. Thanks a lot again. 🙂
i use firefox os 1.3 but i accidently on screen reader but now i cant go to the menu.and i could not open the phone what should i do .. plz help me i bought it today
I can only suggest you follow the suggestions in the post. Or if your device had a recovery mode then use that to reset your phone.
i use 1.4 and same problem i cant open my menu and unlock my phone.. any suggetion plz
sorry, I can’t suggest anything other than what I already documented in the post
thanks!
i didn’t really read the instructions that came up on the phone screen so i feared i’d have to reset everything, so this really helped
Thanks a lot! Your article just saved my phone. I turned on screen reader on my Flame running Firefox OS 1.3 version. You can swipe up and down by using two fingers. But in version 1.3 you have to swipe left or right on your home screen to find the settings app. But that does not work. I have saved Utility as my smart collection in the home page. Then I clicked settings menu from there. And after some time I managed to turn off the screen reader.
By the way, holding down the Power button and the Volume Up button and pressing the Home button all at the same time does ot work to factory reset the phone.
Raiyad, It’s good to hear you recovered your phone and thanks for the feedback.