Android Accessibility setting (Talkback) focus

Question

I have a horizontal recycler view (having most recent item at the right most position and the oldest item at the left most position) below a textview. Once the accessibility control reaches textview, on making right swipe it focuses on the left most item of the recycler view (i.e. 1st item). Is there a way we can set the default focus to the rightmost item.

Answer 1

My answer would be.... don't do this.

Focus order should follow reading order. In left to right languages, independent of how your data is organized, this means left to right.

Picture this: Someone is swiping right through your application, and happily going... next, next, next, next... etc. Then suddenly they swipe onto your control and SKIP over a bunch of content. A blind person is going to assume that "Swiping Right" is moving to the next thing. Now, they have just swiped right onto the right most element of your Recycler View. Are they going to know that they skipped over a bunch of content??? NO. From a blind person's point of view this content is lost, unless somehow they know to swipe right and then swipe left to go backwards... NOT LIKELY.

UNLESS....

Are you going to have "right swipe" move left and manage focus over every element of your container. PLEASE, PLEASE don't do this, getting it correct for all relevant technologies (TalkBack, SpeakBack, Switch Control, BrailleBack, etc) is more difficult than you'd think.

Let's say that you don't go through the pain of managing focus on ALL elements of your Recycler container. From a blind person's point of view, your app looks very different swiping right all the way through it, vs swiping left all the way through it.

To summarize... don't do this!

Notably this is also a duplicate question, as there are many TalkBack focus management questions out there.