Appstore Blogs
We are delighted to announce VoiceView, our new Amazon Fire TV screen reader. With VoiceView, blind and visually impaired customers can navigate and discover content, access settings, and control playback in the core Amazon Fire TV experience.
We encourage you to make your app compatible with VoiceView by December, 20th 2016, which is the 21st Century Communications and Video Accessibility Act (CVAA) compliance deadline.
As per the CVAA, certain applications that deliver video content need to be accessible to blind and visually impaired customers. In order to provide accessibility to the user interface, the CVAA identifies 11 essential functions (Page 38) that, if present in the non-screen-reader experience, should have the option to be voiced aloud.
Our Amazon Fire TV developer documentation describes how to fully leverage VoiceView in order to create a great experience for our blind and visually impaired customers. Customers can turn VoiceView on or off by holding the Back and Menu buttons for 2 seconds. In the few months that VoiceView has been available on Amazon Fire TV we have learned a lot and will release a new version of VoiceView before the end of the year.
If you have any technical questions or need developer assistance as you build support for our shared customers, please contact us (select app submissions and updates from the subject dropdown menu) or visit our developer forums.
Fire TV Developer Documentation
