Why is TikTok's Screen Reader easier to read than 抖音's?

[anhnha]

I've noticed that the format of Screen Reader on 抖音 can be difficult to read, because all the elements like the user name, comment, date, and icon are squished together into a single paragraph. It's hard to tell them apart sometimes as it's unclear where the username ends and the comment begins.
On the other hand, TikTok's Screen Reader format is much better. It keeps everything separate and easy to follow.

I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced the same issue on Screen Reader of 抖音? If so, have you found any workarounds?

 

[mikelove]

This most likely has to do with the way the text in those boxes is being reported to the Android accessibility framework - all it really gives us is a list of boxes and what text is inside each of them, so it seems like in Douyin's case that's how its interface looks to Android; whatever styling is going on in each individual message is seemingly not part of its accessibility design.

Unfortunately there's not a whole lot we can currently do in that case - we have thought about developing some sort of a system that synthesizes input from accessibility and Screen OCR to try to match up text with how it appears on screen, but to be honest, given all of the murmuring we hear from Google about restricting apps' ability to run as background services or access accessibility frameworks for what they do not consider to be legitimate use cases, I'm generally very reluctant to invest a lot of time in adding new features specifically for Screen Reader; we could spend months developing some amazing new system and then get a Developer Program Policy Update email the next day saying that some key part of that system is now totally banned.

We do however have an upgrade in the works for still image OCR that should hopefully make it better at detecting text box locations accurately on its own, so that might make Screen OCR better at doing this on its own even without that huge extra effort.

 

[anhnha]

Thanks for the reply! I think the current screen reader is pretty awesome, but it's still a bit sad to hear that.
I'm not sure how this works. Is it possible to bypass Google and get a license to use the APK file by uploading it directly one your website?

 

[mikelove]

Is it possible to bypass Google and get a license to use the APK file by uploading it directly one your website?

At the moment, yes. However, these policy updates are often followed up by actual technical restrictions, so I don't trust that something that was banned on Play one year would not be subsequently blocked by Android itself in another; we do offer an APK version of Pleco now and would intend to keep offering Screen Reader through that if Google ever blocked it from our main app, but we would not be able to promise that it would keep working indefinitely even if we tried our best to update it to deal with new restrictions.