New 2020 bravia 48A9 accessibility issues and advice

[pawrigh49]

as a recent newcomer to oled and android TV I had high expectations of an improved experience for me and my partially sighted wife.

Sadly this has not been the case.  Out of the box the notable omission was no speech for tv guide or channell information., in fact worse than that entries read as "unlabelled" everywhere, showing youview have simply ignored accessibility. 

Sony could not help, and told us freeview was NOT available as an alternative guid  this all despite having a talking guide demonstrated in store.

We eventually found these steps give a solution for the guide...

1. Disable youview guide

2. Enable TV app

3. Check that screnreader is ON and talkback is OFF

This should help, worked for us.

Sadly several streaming apps we use remain broken at this time, notably iplayer,  all4, and nowtv also.  I have had to plug in a roku stick to fix these, nut of course it is not accessible 

Come on sony! This was so poor I nearly took my tv back! And educate you support team about this fix please, too.

[Peter_S.]

Hi pawrigh49,

Thanks for sharing your findings.

Unfortunately the user experience is related to the various 3rd party apps like on a smartphone.

So in fact the TV is just a device running these apps.

Cheers

Peter

[pawrigh49]

Respectfully I do not agree, or at least not on the main points I had to make.

I can illustrate this very clearly because I have numerous android tablets running all release levels from 6 to 10.

All of my tablets will run the apps perfectly that do not run on my Sony TV. Also my tablets will access audio description from services like prime, but the TV will not.

When it comes to my main advice and issue, the TV guide is a choice made by Sony to install to, I believe, all of their TVs. They take accessibility seriously and have a legal obligation to make it work for the guide as per rest of tv set.

It's not a lot to do with Android apps and it is definitely not something I am just going to meekly accept as such.

It is fortunate that another app gave the workaround to get a speaking guide from Freeview, incredibly AGAINST Sony advice.

I hope you can now see the issue lies with Sony, not android, and I await some official comment from them and hopefully a software update rolled out to clear all this up...