Google is weaving AI developments into its accessibility choices. It is rolling out updates to options throughout Android and Chrome, together with its TalkBack display screen reader and Expressive Captions, the corporate mentioned Thursday.
TalkBack, which was first launched in 2009, reads aloud what’s in your display screen and allows you to navigate your machine utilizing customized gestures, voice instructions or a digital braille keyboard. Final 12 months, Google built-in Gemini into TalkBack to supply richer and clearer picture descriptions.
Gemini in TalkBack can reply questions on what’s in your display screen.
Now, you may ask Gemini questions by way of TalkBack to get extra details about what’s in a photograph. So if somebody sends you a picture and also you need extra particulars about what’s being proven, you may ask, and Gemini will reply. For those who’re on-line purchasing and need to know extra concerning the materials of a gown, Gemini can reply to your inquiries. It may possibly additionally reply questions on something in your display screen, reminiscent of whether or not an merchandise is on sale.
Moreover, Google is rolling out the following model of Expressive Captions, which makes use of AI to convey particulars like depth of speech and background sounds in movies and livestreams. When the characteristic launched in December, it included characterizations like capitalized textual content for phrases spoken with pleasure (reminiscent of “HAPPY BIRTHDAY!”), in addition to descriptions of ambient feels like applause or music.
Expressive Captions can now convey elongated speech.
Now, Expressive Captions will even convey the period of a press release, including letters if a sports activities announcer says “amaaazing shot,” for example, or if somebody in a video says “nooooo.” It may possibly additionally label extra feels like somebody whistling or clearing their throat. The replace is rolling out in English within the US, UK, Canada and Australia on gadgets working Android 15 and up.
It additionally simply obtained simpler to entry PDFs on Chrome. Beforehand, display screen readers could not work together with scanned PDFs in a desktop Chrome browser. Now, Optical Character Recognition makes it doable for Chrome to mechanically acknowledge these PDFs, so you need to use your display screen reader and likewise spotlight, copy and seek for textual content such as you would with every other web page.
Web page Zoom allows you to improve textual content dimension with out throwing off a webpage’s format.
And Web page Zoom now allows you to enlarge textual content in Chrome on Android with out distorting the webpage’s format, much like the way it works on desktop Chrome. To make use of the characteristic, faucet the three-dot menu within the higher proper nook in Chrome and select your zoom degree.
Google’s announcement comes on World Accessibility Consciousness Day, for which different tech firms like Apple and TikTok have additionally shared new options. It arrives scorching on the heels of The Android Present: I/O Version, throughout which Google unveiled Android 16 and Gemini updates. Subsequent week, the search large will probably be internet hosting its I/O builders convention, which is prone to focus closely on AI capabilities.
