Google has announced a bunch of new AI and accessibility features for Android and Chrome in honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day. The company is focusing on integrating its AI, including Gemini models, to enhance experiences for users, particularly those with vision and hearing impairments.
One major update involves Android's TalkBack screen reader. This integration is expanding, allowing users to ask follow-up questions about images and even get descriptions and ask questions about what is on their entire screen. For instance, when looking at a shopping app, a user could ask Gemini about an item's material or if a discount is available.
Android's Expressive Captions, which Google introduced last year to provide real-time transcriptions, is also getting an upgrade. This feature now uses AI to convey better how something is said. A new duration feature will reflect elongated sounds, so a caption might show "amaaazing" or "nooooo" to capture emphasis. Additional sound labels for actions like whistling or clearing one's throat are also being added. The new Expressive Captions will roll out in English in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia for devices running Android 15 and above.
Apart from user-facing features, Google is bolstering speech recognition through Project Euphonia, which works to make speech recognition more accessible for people with non-standard speech. Google is now providing developers with open source repositories via Project Euphonia's GitHub page, enabling them to develop personalized audio tools or train models for diverse speech patterns. Support is also being extended to projects in Africa, like the Centre for Digital Language Inclusion, to improve speech recognition for non-English speakers in 10 African languages.
For ChromeOS and the Chrome browser, Google is also introducing accessibility improvements. Chromebook users taking College Board exams like the SAT or Advanced Placement tests via the Bluebook app will have access to Google's built-in accessibility features, including the ChromeVox screen reader and Dictation. In the Chrome browser on desktop, scanned PDFs will now be automatically processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), making them interactive for screen readers. On Android, Chrome's Page Zoom feature will allow users to increase text size without disrupting webpage layout, similar to its desktop counterpart. This can be customized per page or globally.
In other accessibility news, dialogue-only subtitles are finally making their way to Netflix. Microsoft PowerPoint has gained support for SRT files, allowing you to add subtitles and captions to your presentation. Also, Apple announced a lot of new accessibility features for the upcoming iOS and macOS updates.
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