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