Google sprinkles Chrome and Android with new assistive tricks – here’s what’s new

In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Google announced it’s helping people access their devices in new ways. There are two accessibility features for both Android and Chrome. 

Here’s what’s new.

New accessibility features for Android

Improved Gemini in TalkBack: Last year, Google added image description capability powered by Gemini to TalkBack, the Android screen reader that lets people with vision impairments interact with their devices through spoken words, vibrations, and other audio feedback. 

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Google has expanded that integration to let people go beyond a description and ask questions about an image. For example, if a friend texts you a photo of their new guitar, you can get a description and ask questions about the make and color (or anything else in that image). If you’re shopping, you can ask Gemini about the material of an item on screen or if there’s a sale.

Better Expressive Captions: With a feature called Expressive Captions, users can go beyond a simple transcription of words and get a sense of the feeling of those words. For example, “Oh my gosh, MOM!” on a video from family, or “Catch it, James! OH MY GOODNESS! YES!” on a high school football game video. 

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Google explained that captions will now have an AI-assisted duration feature that adds text like, “Oh nooooooooo!” or “GOAAAAAAAAAAAAAL!”. You’ll also see more labels for sounds like [clearing throat] or [applause].  

New accessibility features for Chrome

Improved PDF access: Previously, if you opened a scanned PDF with Chrome, there was no way to use a screen reader to interact with it. Now, thanks to OCR, Chrome can recognize text in a document and allow you to highlight it, copy it, search it, or use a screen reader to read the text aloud. 

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A more functional Page Zoom: With the existing Page Zoom feature in Chrome for Android, you could zoom in to take a closer look at a website, but you didn’t see the site’s original layout if you went in too far. Now, you can increase the text size on a page while keeping the original page design (exactly how the feature works on Chrome for desktop). You can set different zoom levels for specific pages or set it to apply across the board.

To start using Page Zoom, tap the three-dot menu in the top-right corner of Chrome and set your zoom preferences.

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