What's the status of the android emulator accessibility with NVDA?

By TheBlindGuy07, 8 October, 2026

Forum
Windows

I am not sure to put this in windows or android, but it's about doing android dev with android studio on windows so.
...
When opening AS in a project, device manager, I can roughly see some controls, like power, volume up / down, etc. And the button sign in to google play. With nvda ocr I can read its content but further interaction is quite difficult. Like I know we can just install talkback there although I know that google themselves recommend testing with a phisical device.
I'll be issued an android phone by the college soon like others, so I'd just like to know if trying to get the simulator of AS (or any other way) is a lost cause and I should only do remote code execution / debugging with a real phisical device once I am given one?
Curious about how this would behave on macos, but I am not very impressed by intellij accessibility with VO as the result seem terribly non deterministic just reading a build output or any console program within the ide is a challenge, a bit easier since 27 with image description but one could argue that vocr could do it, and that it's absolutely not the right way, both are true.
Anyways.
As a side note please don't hesitate to dm me about the analog question about macos and ios.

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Comments

By TheBlindGuy07 on Thursday, October 8, 2026 - 22:46

But it's outdated and doesn't wrk beyond 2024 something.

By ziixies on Tuesday, October 13, 2026 - 08:55

I mean it works, but I don't know any of the talkback hard keyboard shortcuts so it's kind of weird to move around. I first installed android 17, got tired of it, deleted it, and now I'm trying to install android 5.0, no Google services, but it doesn't have a screen reader built-in for that version so I'm just get cloni talk back 4.3.1 from 2015 so I can put it into the image

By ziixies on Tuesday, October 13, 2026 - 09:38

So my old talkback version, 4.3.1, had an old relic of the past. You'll remember Xbox pico? That was the speech engineer was using. This is insane, although the almost 30 minutes long screwing around different Java versions and other stuff just to get it working on my MacBook wasn't fun but oh well it's fine.