Android accessibility IMPORTANT_FOR_ACCESSIBILITY_NO is not respected

When you set importantForAccessibility to no, you're only hiding the single view. You want to find the layout for the advertisement, and hide it and all of its descendants.

android:importantForAccessibility="noHideDescendants"

Should you want to do it programmatically, the constant you are looking for is:

IMPORTANT_FOR_ACCESSIBILITY_NO_HIDE_DESCENDANTS

Note: YOU ABSOLUTELY SHOULD NOT, do this. Advertisements are annoying for everyone. Separate is not equal. By hiding information, even annoying information, from VoiceOver you are breaking at least half a dozen WCag 2.0 criteria and making your application less accessible.

This is what I have done to achieve I have blocked descendant focus-ability which ad view gets by default as it get added to the view last. Wrapping the adview in a layout and adding property.

android:descendantFocusability="blocksDescendants"

My requirement was to assign focus to the first element in screen which I achieved using:

firstView.setImportantForAccessibility(View.IMPORTANT_FOR_ACCESSIBILITY_YES);
firstView.sendAccessibilityEvent(AccessibilityEvent.TYPE_VIEW_FOCUSED);

I still agree to the point we should not change focus but this was only in case of ad. The ad is still focusable by touch.