IssueTracker

Description

I'm looking for a new API/enhancement to an existing API that will mimic ViewGroup.setContentDescription on a clickable ViewGroup. Today, there are 3 approaches to setting content descriptions with Compose:

• semantics { contentDescription = "blah" }
• semantics(mergeDescendants = true) { contentDescription = "blah" }
• clearAndSetSemantics { contentDescription = "blah" }

None of these mimic ViewGroup.setContentDescription on a clickable ViewGroup, where descendant widgets would be ignored unless they're clickable/focusable.

The second one is the one which I expected would behave this way, but it concatenates content descriptions of descendant nodes (as explained in the well-written docs for that API), even if they're not clickable.

Since Jetpack Compose is stable, it's not possible to change the current behavior, so I am requesting another mechanism which achieves the same.

Use Case

For complex widgets (e.g. a Tweet), especially in organizations with separate teams working on the same codebase, crafting and setting an explicit content description is preferable to relying on the framework's implicit concatenation.

An example with a simple widget:

Row(
    modifier = Modifier.clickable() { /* TODO */ }
) {
    Icon()
    Column {
        Text("User")
        Text("Message")
    } 
    Button()
}

In this example, we'd want to set an explicit content description on the Row, but leave the Button as-is (focusable, clickable).

If we use clearAndSetSemantics(), we can set the description (without getting "User" and "Message" concatenated onto it), but then we lose the button.

The only workaround today is to use clearAndSetSemantics {} on each of the Text nodes.

Row(
    modifier = Modifier.clickable() { /* TODO */ }
        .semantics { contentDescription = "my row" }
) {
    Icon()
    Column {
        Text("User", modifier = Modifier.clearAndSetSemantics {} )
        Text("Message", modifier = Modifier.clearAndSetSemantics {} )
    } 
    Button()
}

Here they're grouped together so we could clear the semantics on the column, but it's a contrived example - it would be easy to consider a case where there are many text elements which are not contiguous.

Some API like this would be much preferred:

Row(
    modifier = Modifier.clickable() { /* TODO */ }
        .clearAndSetSemantics { contentDescription = "my row" }
) {
    Icon()
    Column {
        Text("User")
        Text("Message")
    } 
    Button(
        modifier = Modifier.keepSemantics()
    )
}

where keepSemantics() is very explicit and can be used to mark important elements which should not lose their semantics.