- Google has updates for Global Accessibility Awareness Day
- The new features cover Android and Google Chrome
- You can now ask Gemini questions about images on screen
We’ve already seen a bunch of updates for Apple products in honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day this week, and now it’s Google’s turn – with four important upgrades on the way to Android and Chrome.
As per the official blog post, the TalkBack screen reader feature in Android is getting some extra smarts, on top of the existing Gemini-powered functionality. The feature provides image descriptions for blind and low-vision users, even when no alt text is provided.
Now, you’ll be able to ask Gemini follow-up questions about the image that’s showing on screen – so if you need to know what color something is, or what else is showing in the picture, Gemini will be able to help out.
There’s also an update to Expressive Captions, which provides on-screen subtitles for anything with audio on your phone. Those subtitles will now reflect drawn on words, so you’ll be able to tell the difference between “no” and “noooooooooo”, Google says.
Chrome and language support
We’ve got some accessibility improvements to talk about with Google Chrome, too. First up, scanned PDFs are getting Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which means you’ll be able to search for text inside them, and copy that text somewhere else.
For Chrome on Android, Page Zoom (above) is adding a feature to let you increase the size of text on pages, without affecting anything else (like images or layouts). To set up the feature, tap the three dots (top right) in a tab, then Settings > Accessibility.
Google is also improving speech recognition technologies around the world, giving developers more resources for non-standard speech patterns and non-English languages, as part of its ongoing Project Euphoria initiative.
Finally, a full suite of accessibility features are on the way to Google’s Bluebook app, which can be used as a testing platform. Upgrades for dictation and the screen reader tech should make the app more accessible than ever.
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