The Situation:

I have a Galaxy S3 from Verizon (SCH-I535). I recently downloaded a bunch of apps that I was trying out, most of which were augmented reality apps. One of them was IOnRoad, which is a pretty cool concept to assist in safe driving. IOnRoad uses the TalkBack Accessibility function. The TalkBack feature is a service to help the blind and otherwise impaired, it essentially reads and describes everything going on on the screen. It can also be used to read aloud other things.

The Problem:

Whenever I booted up my phone the Talkback notification, a little hand icon, would be displayed in the notification bar. When pulled down, Talkback would be listed as an Ongoing service. Upon checking the status of Talkback in the accessibility options of the phone, it was displayed as off. To remove the notification temporarily, I had to turn it on then off again. The notification would be gone until the next time I rebooted.

Now, I probably reboot my phone more than other people do, probably once every few days. I just like a fresh device, and the GS3 has enough battery problems for me to want to make sure no unnecessary apps/services are running the background taking up valuable battery life. Every time I would reboot, the TalkBack notification would be there again.

The Solution:

Now I did a bunch of things and I'm not quite sure which one worked. They are listed below.

• Uninstalled IOnRoad. This is probably the one. After uninstalling I rebooted. However, I also did some other things:
• Force stopped the app. This can be achieved by opening up the Application manager under System Settings, swiping left to show the right-most column "All", scrolling to and selecting "TalkBack" and clicking "Force stop".
• Disabling & re-enabling the TalkBack service. This option is right next to "Force stop", as described above.

When I talked to Samsung support about this, they simply told me to wipe the partition cache. When that didn't work, they told me it was all they could do and a hardware specialist would have to look at it. Meh. Anyway, that solved the problem! I hope it helps someone else!