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Android TV Oreo accessibility problems

Hi,

When I activate accessibility for Tasker on my Android TV (Mi Box) running Oreo I can no longer access the left bar of apps, only the cards on the right.

Check the attached image, normally you can access everything shown in the picture. But as soon as I activate accessibility I cannot move the "cursor" over to the left (circled in blue).

I am 100% that Tasker is the problem, tested on two boxes, same thing.

3 replies

The problem is I don't have any clue of what's causing it... Do you have any clues on what the bug is? Thanks!

It was previously thought to only be able to be fixed by Google themselves (which they’ve done nothing). Even Nvidia themselves said so on the Shield TV forums.

But at least this developer figured a way around it, I don’t know what they had to do, but it worked. I’m emailing the developer of: 

http://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=flar2.homebutton&hl=en_US

about the release notes:

”0.88/0.89:
-fix AndroidTV Oreo bugs”

asking if they can comment on this thread letting us know how they did it. As far as I’m aware, they’re the first to get around the “bug.”

 

Got a response from the developer of Button Mapper:

”The accessibility service needs to use feedbackHaptic or feedbackVibrate instead of feedbackGeneric

 
Regards,
Aaron”
 
Seems like an easy fix actually. I’ll email him thanking him but is that good enough for you to go off of?

Let me know if you need any further information and I'll see what I can find.

Thank you! Can you please try this version?

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_MCmNfnK4FpFB7HFOgkQxNKbtbmbb8Rs

TC

Since no one replies, I registered to just post my test result. The new auto input fixed the accessibility issue on Android TV Oreo. 

Great we got that tested, now we just need some support for that for the Tasker App itself as well (maybe even an update to put it on the Android TV App Store so it will AutoUpdate). 

PS. I will also test this new version and make sure it fixes the accessibility bug on my Shield. Thank you for implementing that so quickly. 

Great, glad it works :)

Did you enable accessibility services for other apps? Do those services have the same kind of access Tasker has?

Why do you feel this is not a bug in Oreo itself?

J

True, but I have not noticed it with any other application.

It appears to be both. Either an individual developer can workaround it (since Google changed the way Accessibility is handled, apps need to adjust) like Button Mapper did, or Google could undo the problem (they’re aware of it, but seem to think developers should just handle it themselves since they haven’t done anything about it and haven’t promised to do so). 

Almost all apps using accessibility has this bug when accessibility was activated but that’s slowly changing. Arguably, Tasker and AutoInput are the biggest apps that stilll haven’t worked around the issue. 

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