TalkBack, not say "alert" when going to an alert dialog (or) alternative to alert dialog

Question

I came across this issue when designing my application to be accessible using Talkback.

When android opens an alert dialog, it read out the word "alert" followed by the rest of the dialog. I am not using the alert dialog to display an alert as such, is there any way to make sure android reads out the dialog directly without reading out the word "alert".

Also, is there an alternative to the alert dialog if I just want to display some data that pops up from the screen and can be dismissed the same way an alert dialog is dismissed and that talk back works well with?

Answer 1

Based in this Google Groups post, you can do it just by overriding the View.dispatchPopulateAccessibilityEvent method.

For example:

@Override
public boolean dispatchPopulateAccessibilityEvent(AccessibilityEvent event) {
    //super.dispatchPopulateAccessibilityEvent(event);
    event.setBeforeText("My custom alert title text");
    event.getText().clear();
    return true;
}

Answer 2

A bit late, but for anybody reading this now, override the dialog's view like this:

class NoAlertDialog @JvmOverloads constructor(context: Context, attrs: AttributeSet? = null, defStyleAttr: Int = 0)
    : RelativeLayout(context, attrs, defStyleAttr) {

    init {
        inflate(context, R.layout.dialog, this)
    }

    override fun dispatchPopulateAccessibilityEvent(event: AccessibilityEvent?): Boolean {
        Log.e("Logging", "Event dispatched: " + event?.action)
        if (event?.action == AccessibilityEvent.CONTENT_CHANGE_TYPE_UNDEFINED) {
            return true
        }
        return super.dispatchPopulateAccessibilityEvent(event)
    }
}

If it doesn't work, try comparing a different AccessibilityEvent int, use the one that's logged in the logger.