The Trials and Tribulations of Setting Up Android Phones for Non-English Speakers in 2024: Google and Samsung are the Typical Culprits

Question: how do you set up an Android phone if you’re blind and cannot speak English in 2024? first option: ask someone to lend their sight and give them your passwords, and you’re good to go. The second option might be a bit costly but offers an exhaustive solution: buy a plane ticket to any English-speaking country, set up your phone, and come back.

Leaving the joke aside, Setting up an Android phone or an iPhone should theoretically be an easy process, and TalkBack on Android and VoiceOver on the iPhone are there to give you spoken feedback during the set-up process. VoiceOver has all the TTS languages supported built-in to the system, with the compact variant by default. TalkBack, on the other hand, has only a few languages built-in to the system.

When you want to set up your Android phone, the very first options that come up are the region and language settings. So if you live in a region where the language is English, you can continue further all by yourself. But if your region is not English or either of the few pre-installed languages, you’re stuck. You need sighted help. On some occasions, setting up your phone without a SIM card assumes you are in an English-speaking region, and you will have the TTS speak in English even after choosing your native language. Or some Chinese phones require inserting your SIM card, and it will download the appropriate voice data from Speech Recognition and Synthesis, aka Google TTS, using mobile data, and you can continue setting up your phone. It’s also worth mentioning that in some regions or countries, either Google blocks access to Speech Recognition and Synthesis and the Play Store, or governments block access to the Play Store and Speech Recognition and Synthesis. As such, one needs to install a VPN to circumvent the limitations. But installing a VPN before the completion of the set-up process is very much out of the question.

What’s the alarming issue?

Few days ago an experienced visually impaired Android user in Turkey decided to buy an S24 Ultra, the most recent flagship device released by Samsung. From his last experience, he was also the one showing us how to set up a Samsung phone using the English voice data of the Samsung TTS. What we do is turn on TalkBack by pressing both the volume keys for a few seconds and once again to confirm that we want to turn it on. Then we move through the granularity options, find language, and swipe up or down until we find a language with installed voice data. At least that was the case for setting up a Samsung phone running Android 13 or Android 14 based on One UI 6.0.

But it is different with One UI 6.1 from Samsung, or any phone which reaches the market with the latest release of Google TalkBack. You turn on TalkBack, and there’s no language option within the granularity settings. As for that user and his saga, luckily his daughter was around to help him set up the device.

Solutions, conclusions and some thoughts

This recent incident shows that the Android operating system itself also needs to have all of the TTS languages built in so as not to leave the visually impaired in the proverbial dark. And in this case, the major players—Google and Samsung—need to consider this and make a change. Having all the voice data for all supported languages in the system won’t exceed 2GB, considering the significant increase in phone internal storage, which can now go up to 1TB. It’s widely known that Google TTS supports a variety of languages, and each language pack has a relatively small size. Having all languages built in will not have any negative impact, especially since users can remove the languages they don’t need later.

Another less ideal approach is to display a warning when the system detects an unsupported language. This warning, presented in English—recognized internationally across a variety of countries—would inform the user that continuing with the unsupported language may result in the loss of speech. The warning could suggest using the English TTS until an Internet connection is established. Alternatively, it could offer the choice to set up the device with English as the default language. In cases where the user knows English or the language used employs Latin-based characters, opting for English TTS would provide a better experience than having no speech at all.

Additionally, Google must undergo a significant shift in its approach to avoid such glitches and hiccups. One necessary change involves removing the arbitrary limitation imposed on beta-testing TalkBack only in the USA and a few other primarily English-speaking countries. If Apple can conduct global beta-testing for iOS and VoiceOver, there’s no reason for Google to actively reject that approach.

In retrospect, this also stems from insufficient beta-testing. When Google doesn’t have a large public beta testing program for Android, when such a program is further limited to people who reside mostly in the USA, it’s not difficult to imagine all sorts of issues like this. How many blind users have been able to report this to Google or Samsung, and honestly, how many of them have bumped into this in the USA? Unfortunately – and most probably – zero. On the other hand, does Samsung have an active TalkBack beta-testing program? How is it that Samsung keeps developing TalkBack, keeps lagging behind the official TalkBack release in terms of features and functionality, and avoids launching a specific beta-testing program for its ONE UI-specific TalkBack releases? Does Samsung have an accessibility desk, and who takes their TalkBack bug reports into account? Sadly we’ve got more questions rather than answers. But one extra point is worth mentioning here. If Google Accessibility is to move ahead and embrace more visually impaired users, it’s also incumbent upon visually impaired TalkBack beta testers in the USA or the UK to keep nudging Google to make the required changes. Simply asking non-English speakers to contact Google, remaining nonchalant, and not providing this type of crucial feedback in each TalkBack beta cycle to Google won’t help.