Accessibility : RecyclerView with grouping

Grouping in accessibility , means that , to add focus on parent layout , and no child layout will get the focus separately .

Traversing the child elements , one by another ,increases the steps , and also visually -impaired persons may face difficulty to understand the whole view-group , so to reduce these issues , grouping can be done.

RecyclerView , is a good example to understand the grouping scenario.

EmployeeData is showing in RecyclerView , having 3 textviews .When the grouping was not done , talkback will traverse each and every textview , like this :

Recycler View before grouping

• To add grouping , all the child elements need to set android:importantForAccessibility="no" which will hide the child elements from talkback .

• And add android:importantForAccessibility="yes" to container layout of  row_item , which will set focus to the container layout (ViewGroup) .

• Also add appropriate content description to container layout .

<androidx.constraintlayout.widget.ConstraintLayout
    android:importantForAccessibility="yes"
    android:id="@+id/layoutParent">

    <ImageView
        android:id="@+id/image_emp"
        android:importantForAccessibility="no"/>

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textEmployeeName"
        android:importantForAccessibility="no"/>

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textEmployeeId"
        android:importantForAccessibility="no"
       />

    <TextView
        android:id="@+id/textJoining"
        android:importantForAccessibility="no"
        />
</androidx.constraintlayout.widget.ConstraintLayout>

And in adapter class :

textEmployeeName.text = "Employee Name : ${employee.empName}"
textEmployeeId.text = "Employee ID: ${employee.empId}"
textJoining.text = "Joining Date:  ${employee.empJoiningDate }"

layoutParent.contentDescription = textEmployeeName.text.toString()+" " +
                    textEmployeeId.text.toString()+" "+
                    textJoining.text.toString()+" "

Here in adapter class all the 3 textviews' text have been appended and set content description of  layoutParent  , which will look like this :

RecyclerView after grouping