Hey everyone!
As you may know, new EU legislation (European Accessibility Act) will soon require mobile apps to comply with accessibility standards — meaning screen reader support, proper navigation, and accessibility-friendly semantics are no longer optional.Our developers recently started integrating accessibility support into our Jetpack Compose Android app, and we’ve hit a challenge that directly affects our Appium test automation (using UiAutomator2 driver).
Specifically, we’re trying to:
- Prevent the screen reader from reading certain child elements
- Avoid child nodes being focusable by accessibility services
- Still keep all nodes (parent + children) visible in the UI hierarchy / page source so Appium can locate them.
But many Compose options like clearAndSetSemantics {} or invisibleToUser() completely remove child nodes from the accessibility tree — which makes them invisible to Appium as well.
Has anyone here run into the same issue?
How did you implement accessibility in a way that preserves test automation visibility?
Any tips, patterns, or workarounds would be super appreciated - Unfortunately, using Espresso driver is not feasible for us.
Thanks in advance!