On the occasion of the World Accessibility Awareness Day, Google previewed new specific features to meet users with disabilities in using the devices or services of their ecosystem. The new features presented by the Mountain View giant concern the next version of the green robot operating system, Android 13, but also many services of the Workspace suite.
Google previews many features for accessibility
This week the biggest technological giants, from Microsoft to Apple, focused on the theme of accessibility, which culminated with today’s day, the eleventh World Accessibility Awareness Day, previewing new devices, hardware and software, to make more accessible their devices and services.
Google is no exception, which today previewed many accessibility functions arriving on many services of its ecosystem, intervening on services such as Gmail or Google Meet but also on the Android and Chrome OS operating systems.
Alt Text on Gmail
Gmail will soon allow you to add alt text to images, including GIFs, that are sent (not as a file) via e-mail, allowing visually impaired or blind users using screen reading tools to hear descriptions of images added by the sender. The novelty is already being distributed globally today.
Multi-pin on Google Meet
Thanks to this feature, users will be able to fix multiple video frames on the screen (until now it was only possible to fix one); this will allow users who communicate through sign language to see, at the same time, the video of the interlocutor and an interpreter. This is a feature that premiered last year.
English audio description for YouTube Originals English
audio descriptions for all English language YouTube Originals content have been available since last year, but now Google has extended the ability to enjoy them globally. Once the video is open, to activate the audio track with the description, simply follow the path “ Settings> Audio track ” and select “ English, description ”.
What’s new with Android 13 beta 3
Google is also thinking about its purely mobile ecosystem and, starting with the next Android 13 beta 3, ready-to-use support for Braille devices will be introduced directly in Google Talkback. You no longer need to download and install the BrailleBack app from the Google Play Store. Talkback also adds new shortcuts for text navigation (scrolling between characters, words or lines) and for editing text (skipping to the end of documents, making a selection or copy-paste).
Google Docs also receives improvements for Braille
Specifically, the aspects related to comments and content highlighted in Braille have been improved in Google Docs.
New in Chrome OS
Chrome OS, Google’s laptop operating system, lets you enter text into any text field simply by speaking; to do this, just click the microphone icon in the status bar or press the key combination ” Search + D ” to start the dictation process.
In a future perspective, the research of Project Euphonia continues, the project for the creation of more inclusive speech recognition models for people with speech problems, unveiled by Google on the occasion of Google I / O 2019. The project is now expanding to new languages such as French, Hindi, Japanese and Spanish.