- Google has updates to Global Accessibility Awareness Day
- The new features cover Android and Google Chrome
- You can now ask Gemini questions about photos on screen
We’ve already seen a lot of updates to 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.
According to the official blog post, the Talkback Screen Reader feature in Android gets some extra smart on top of the existing Gemini-driven functionality. The feature contains image descriptions for users of the blind and low vision, even when there is no all-text.
Now you will be able to ask Gemini follow-up questions about the image that appears on the screen-so if you need to know what color something is or what else is shown in the picture, Gemini will be able to help.
There is also an update for expressive captions that give subtitles on the screen to everything with audio on your phone. These subtitles now reflect drawn on words so you can tell the difference between “no” and “nooooooooooo”, Google says.
Chrome and language support
We also have some accessibility improvements to talk about with Google Chrome. First up, scanned PDFs get Optical Character Recognition (OCR), which means you can search for text inside them and copy that text somewhere else.
For Chrome on Android, Page Zoom (above) adds a feature to let you increase the size of text on pages without affecting anything else (like images or layouts). To configure the feature, press the three dots (top right) in a tab then Settings> Accessibility.
Google also improves speech recognition technologies all over the world, giving developers more resources for non-standard numbers and non-English languages, as part of its ongoing project Euphori initiative.
Finally, a full package of accessibility features is on the way to Google’s Bluebook app that can be used as a test platform. Upgrades to dictation and screen reader tech should make the app more accessible than ever.
