How to check status of Remove Animations accessibility setting programmatically

Question

I'm trying to check for the status of Remove animations accessibility setting in order to enable/disable some UI and GIFs animations on my app, but i don't see any exposed method in AccessibilityManager in order to access this value:

Is there any easy way to access this value? Even with reflection

Quintin Balsdon · Accepted Answer · 2022-01-26T09:01:16.513

I have checked and when this value is toggled 3 values are modified:

//global settings
animator_duration_scale=0
transition_animation_scale=0
window_animation_scale=0

You can programmatically determine these by checking:

    if (Settings.Global.getFloat(context.contentResolver, Settings.Global.ANIMATOR_DURATION_SCALE) == 0f)
         // Animations Off behaviour
    else
         // Animations On behaviour

I made a method that checks all three are not 0 (since all 3 would be aligned, and I think that these can sometimes be toggled elsewhere):

    fun animationsEnabled(): Boolean =
        !(Settings.Global.getFloat(contentResolver, Settings.Global.ANIMATOR_DURATION_SCALE) == 0f
                && Settings.Global.getFloat(contentResolver, Settings.Global.TRANSITION_ANIMATION_SCALE) == 0f
                && Settings.Global.getFloat(contentResolver, Settings.Global.WINDOW_ANIMATION_SCALE) == 0f)

Remember these are scaling numbers so they are not just 0 and 1! That's why we need to get their float values and also why we check against 0. Then we need to remember that they will ALL be set to 0 if animations are off.

Sources:

Thanks for your reply, i ended up doing this and works like a charm! — nsL, Jun 04 '21 at 16:35

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered May 10 '22 at 09:45

One note about the above solution provided by quintin-balsdon: it is important to use the version of Settings.Global.getFloat that takes a default value, as it appears that (on emulators at least) if 'Remove animation' has never been switched on on a given device, then (at least) the setting for key Settings.Global.ANIMATOR_DURATION_SCALE won't exist, and this code will result in an exception.

I'd therefore suggest:

fun Context.animationsEnabled(): Boolean =
    !(Settings.Global.getFloat(contentResolver, Settings.Global.ANIMATOR_DURATION_SCALE, 1.0f) == 0f
            && Settings.Global.getFloat(contentResolver, Settings.Global.TRANSITION_ANIMATION_SCALE, 1.0f) == 0f
            && Settings.Global.getFloat(contentResolver, Settings.Global.WINDOW_ANIMATION_SCALE, 1.0f) == 0f)

How to check status of Remove Animations accessibility setting programmatically

2 Answers2