Quintin Balsdon
Technology Advocate, Evinced
London, United Kingdom
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I am a mobile accessibility engineer with Evinced, who makes automation tools for accessibility checking for Android, iOS and Web. I have has been an Android Engineer since 2011 and have been specialising in accessibility since 2020. I was in charge of Android accessibility at Spotify for 2 and half years, and worked on the accessibility of the National Health Service Covid-19 track and trace app.
I developed and presented Droidcon Academy's "Accessibility in Jetpack Compose" course (https://academy.droidcon.com/course/accessibility-in-android-jetpack-compose). I have also developed an Android Accessibility plugin for Android Studio called the "Android Ally" (https://plugins.jetbrains.com/plugin/23902-android-ally)
Area of Expertise
Topics
Accessibility: Solving for Role, Name, Value in Jetpack Compose
In this session software engineers will learn the fundamentals of the accessibility criteria "Role, Name and Value" and how to use Jetpack Compose to meet this criteria.
You will learn the different API's that are made available to you in Jetpack Compose and how to efficiently implement accessibility using Jetpack Compose APIs. You will learn
- The importance and impact of an elements role, name and value on a user
- The difference between a content description and a state description
- What roles are and which ones to use
- How and when to group elements or break them down
- Shorthand modifier API's for common patterns such as grouping (a label and a checkbox, for example)
After this session, engineers should be able to understand the lift of creating a new component from scratch and how to effectively make elements more accessible to users, not just for screen readers like TalkBack, but many assitive technologies.
What is your experience level with the topic?
5+ years. 2 years @(a UK Bank), 1 year@NHS England, 2.5 years@Spotify (not my current employer)
I also developed the Accessibility Jetpack Compose course for Droidcon
Have you given this talk before?
No
The Android Ally: An accessibility plugin for Android Studio
Android Engineers are flooded with requirements, and quite often accessibility is tacked on at some point in the middle or end of your delivery phase. It sneaks up on you and then all the problems make you feel like you're drinking from a firehose.
In this session you will learn about the Android Ally plugin for Android Studio by means of a live demo. Quintin (the presenter) wrote the Android Ally over the course of many years in his roles serving as an Android accessibility subject matter expert.
The Android Ally:
- Simplifies TalkBack navigation by using quick action buttons rather than complex gestures
- Turn TalkBack on (and more importantly) off with a single click
- Allows for real device and emulator testing of TalkBack (WearOS included)
- Exposes the numerous accessibility settings normalling hidden by complex menus or Android Debug Bridge (ADB) commands
- Has a handy checklist that can be exported to markdown for tickets and pull requests
Addressing accessibility early not only ensures the best possible user experience from any point in your app's lifecycle, it ensures that many more people can actually use your applications. Addressing accessibility problems early can reduce the cost of fixing them later by up to 100 times! (1:10:100 rule, IBM, Jan 2010)
What is your experience level with the topic?
5+ years. 2 years @(a UK Bank), 1 year@NHS England, 2.5 years@Spotify (not my current employer)
I also developed the Accessibility Jetpack Compose course for Droidcon
Have you given this talk before?
No
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