- Google has updates for the global day awareness day
- The new features cover Android and Google Chrome
- Now you can ask Gemini questions about images on the screen
We have already seen a lot of updates for Apple products in honor of the global accessibility awareness day this week, and now it is Google’s turn, with four important updates on the way to Android and Chrome.
According to the official publication of the blog, the Talkback screen reader function in Android is obtaining some additional intelligence, in addition to the existing functionality with Gemini. The feature provides descriptions of images for blind and low vision users, even when no alt text is provided.
Now, you can ask Gemini tracking questions about the image shown on the screen, so if you need to know what color is something or what is more shown in the image, Gemini can help.
There is also an update of expressive subtitles, which provides screen subtitles for anything with audio on your phone. These subtitles will now reflect the words, so you can notice the difference between “no” and “noooooooo,” says Google.
Chrome and language support
We also have some accessibility improvements to talk to Google Chrome. First, scanned PDFs are obtaining the recognition of optical characters (OCR), which means that you can look for text within them and copy that text elsewhere.
For Chrome on Android, Page Zoom (above) is adding a function to allow you to increase the size of the text in the pages, without affecting anything else (such as images or designs). To configure the function, touch the three points (top right) in a tab, then Configuration> Accessibility.
Google is also improving voice recognition technologies worldwide, providing developers for more resources for non -standard voice patterns and non -English languages, as part of their euphoria initiative of the current project.
Finally, a complete set of accessibility functions is on its way to Google Bluebook application, which can be used as a test platform. Updates for the dictation and technology of the screen reader should make the application more accessible than ever.
