Have you ever found yourself in a situation whereby you couldn’t use your phone because it was talking back to you? You are not alone. There is a feature on all mobile phones called Talkback.
What is Talkback?
TalkBack is a feature on mobile phones developed to aid blind and low-vision users by speaking actions out loud as items.
As you can see, Talkback is not for good vision people, whenever this feature is activated accidentally on your phone, it could be frustrating, to say the least, especially if it is happening to you for the first time. You will not be able to use your phone the way you ought to be using it. This is the reason why this content was put together in case you find yourself in this situation and you are in search of how to turn off TalkBack on your phone.
So whenever this feature is activated accidentally on your phone and your phone starts talking back to you, reading aloud what’s on your screen, you don’t need to panic, it’s just an Android feature known as TalkBack. It is an accessibility service developed to assist visually impaired and blind people use Android devices to their fullest.
TalkBack acts as a controller and screen-reader when activated and the visually impaired, blind, or anyone who chooses to enable it can have eyes-free control of their phone. What we’re saying is that with an activated TalkBack, you’ll be able to control your Android phone without looking at the screen.
Overall, it is a beneficial feature on the Android ecosystem that aims to connect more people, bringing the best of a modern smartphone to the disabled. But if you’ve mistakenly enabled it on your phone and it’s becoming intrusive, we’ll be showing you methods and steps in this article to help to disable it.
How to Turn Off TalkBack on Your Phone using the Volume Key Shortcut
This is arguably the fastest way to disable or turn off TalkBack on your Android phone. Provided you enabled an accessibility shortcut when you were setting up the TalkBack on your phone, then you can disable it with the volume buttons.
• Check where the volume keys on your phone are located.
• Then press and hold the two-volume keys for about 3 seconds
• You should hear the TalkBack voice saying “TalkBack OFF”. It means that you’ve successfully disabled or turned off the feature on your phone.
In case you did not enable accessibility shortcuts when you were enabling TalkBack, then try the next method below.
Turn Off TalkBack from your Phone Accessibility Settings
Here, you’ll try to disable the TalkBack feature from your phone’s Settings. Note that with TalkBack enabled or activated, you may need to double-tap before you can select anything on your phone’s screen. You can turn off or disable TalkBack via Settings by following this guideline;
• On your smartphone, go to Settings.
• Tap on “Accessibility”
• Click on “TalkBack”
• You’ll see a switch next to “Use TalkBack”, click on it.
• Then tap “STOP” to permanently turn off or disable TalkBack on your Android phone.
Turn Off TalkBack on Your Phone using Google Assistant
Yes, you can also use Google Assistant to turn off TalkBack on your phone. So if the first two methods seem unfruitful, you should try this one. The Google Assistant can be used to do virtually everything on your Android phone, after all, it is an AI-powered virtual assistant. Here is how you can use the virtual assistant to disable or turn off TalkBack;
• Open the Google Assistant in whichever is possible.
• Now say “Turn off talk back”
• After that, you should receive a response from the virtual assistant confirming the request. And that’s it, TalkBack has been disabled or turns off on your Android phone.
Turn Off TalkBack on your Phone Lock Screen
Lastly, you can turn off or disable TalkBack on your lock screen. It is advantageous to turn off TalkBack on the lock screen for privacy reasons and also guarantees that your phone won’t start talking back to you when it’s locked. The steps to turn off TalkBack on phones running on Android 11 OS is quite different from that of phones running on Android 10 OS or lower.
For Android 11 devices:
• Go to Settings on your device and open it.
• Then select “Accessibility” and scroll to the bottom.
• You should see the “Shortcut From Lock Screen” under the “Experimental”, turn it off.
For Android 10 devices or below:
• Launch your phone’s Settings.
• Tap on “Accessibility”
• Then select “Volume key shortcut”
• Now turn off or disable the “Allow from lock screen”.
