Android Code Snippet "high-contrast text" system setting - work-around for colored text (or font icons)

Android 5+ has an accessibility system setting called "high-contrast fonts", which lets the user force text (or icons rendered using fonts like Material or FontAwesome) to be outlined black or white (instead of the color you set). If you use colored text (or text-based icons) to indicate important things, this can play havoc with your UI.

One solution is to detect this setting and tell the user to turn it off. However, they might need it for other apps, so that would be a bit rude. Also, many users will either not bother to turn it off, or will not know how to.

A better solution is to bypass this system setting for the specific bits of colored text that you think should not be reduced to black or white. I initially did this by replacing the text with a bitmap created using canvas.drawText. But Android 9+ overrides this as well, so I did some research and found that canvas.drawTextPath does the trick on all Android versions (as far as I know). This function is easy to use via the (excellent) ABExtDrawing library.

Here's the code I used for changing Material icons (characters using the Material font) to bitmaps. You could easily adapt this for FontAwesome or for normal text.

sub whereverYouSetTheColoredText
    const ICON_GROUP as int = 0xE2C7    'sample icon from Material font
    someLabel.SetBackgroundImage(generateBitmapFromIconCode(ICON_GROUP, colors.Red, 16, someLabel.Height))
end sub

Sub generateBitmapFromIconCode(iconArg As Int, colorArg As Int, textSizeArg As Int, bitmapSizeArg As Int) As Bitmap
    Dim tempBitmap As Bitmap
    tempBitmap.InitializeMutable(bitmapSizeArg, bitmapSizeArg)
    Dim tempCanvas As Canvas
    tempCanvas.Initialize2(tempBitmap)
     
    Dim textPaint As ABPaint = buildTextPaint(FONT_MATERIAL, colorArg, textSizeArg)
    Dim x As Float = bitmapSizeArg / 2
    Dim y As Float = bitmapSizeArg + 0dip    'depending on the arguments, you may need a vertical offset here
    drawTextPath(tempCanvas, textPaint, iconArg, x, y)

    Return tempBitmap
End Sub

Sub buildTextPaint(typefaceArg As Typeface, colorArg As Int, textSizeArg As Int) As ABPaint
    Dim tempPaint As ABPaint
    tempPaint.Initialize
    tempPaint.SetStyle(tempPaint.Style_FILL)
    tempPaint.SetTextAlign(tempPaint.Align_CENTER)
    tempPaint.SetColor(colorArg)
    tempPaint.setTypeface(typefaceArg)
    tempPaint.SetTextSize(textSizeArg * GetDeviceLayoutValues.Scale)
    Return tempPaint
End Sub

Sub drawTextPath(canvasArg As Canvas, paintArg As ABPaint, iconArg As Int, x As Float, y As Float)
    paintArg.GetTextPath(Chr(iconArg), 0, 1, x, y, textPath)
    Dim abDraw As ABExtDrawing
    abDraw.drawPath(canvasArg, textPath, paintArg)
End Sub