Android Accessibility Overview

Authored by: Support.com Tech Pro Team

1. Introduction

Your Android device offers a large number of different Accessibility options to make using your tablet or phone easier.

This guide will walk you to accessing them, and give information on how each works.

2. Accessibility Settings

1. Open Settings on your phone or tablet.
   

1. Scroll down, then select Accessibility.
   

Accessibility Options

Each accessibility option controls a different aspect of how your Android device works, and most have a description built-in. The following is a description of the most common features, so you can jump to the ones that sound most helpful to you.

Magnification

This allows you to use the volume up and down buttons to zoom in and out on your phone screen, instead.

Captions

When watching video content with audio, if available, will always display closed captioning, showing the words spoken on-screen.

Magnification gesture

Another way to magnify the screen, using two- and three-finger motions and gestures.

Font size

Allows you to make all the text on the screen larger or smaller.

High contrast text

Text colors are changed to black-on-white or white-on-black (or very close to that). This improves readability for some people.

Power button ends call

This allows you to push the power button to hang up calls.

Auto rotate screen

The screen will rotate automatically when you hold the phone tall or wide. This is on by default.

Speak passwords

Will say the letters and numbers you type in for passwords out loud. Keep in mind this means anyone near by can hear them.

Mono audio

Combines the left and right audio channels. While mono, this can help make things a bit clearer for some people.

Accessibility shortcut

This allows for a fast shortcut back to the Accessibility options. Either by pushing and holding the power button, or holding two fingers on the screen for a while.

Text-to-speech output

Here, you can change how fast it talks, and the pitch of the text-to-speech system.

Touch & hold delay

This allows you to increase, or decrease how long you have to hold something to bring up its context menu.

Color inversion

This will reverse all the colors, making the screen more readable for some people.

Color correction

Specifically for color blind people, this makes minor changes to the screen colors so people with specific types of color blindness will have an easier time reading the screen.