On Global Accessibility Awareness Day, tech companies are rolling out new features to support users with disabilities. Meta introduced enhancements like descriptive Meta AI and Live AI, while Google is expanding accessibility on both Android and Chrome.
In a recent blog post, Google announced that it’s integrating Gemini into its TalkBack service. For those unfamiliar, TalkBack is designed for users with visual impairments, providing spoken feedback about on-screen content. With Gemini integration, TalkBack can now describe images on your Android device and even respond to follow-up questions about what’s shown on the screen offering a more interactive and informative experience.
Google’s Material 3 Expressive design has been generating buzz, but another exciting expressive upgrade coming to Android is in captions. Expressive captions, now available in the US, UK, Canada, and Australia, aim to reflect audio more accurately. For instance, if a sports commentator says, “Amaaaazing shot,” the captions will mirror the actual tone and emphasis, rather than simplifying it to just “Amazing.”
Chrome is also receiving two key accessibility upgrades – Page Zoom and improved PDF access. With Page Zoom, users can now enlarge only the text on a webpage without zooming into the entire layout. In addition, Chrome now supports OCR (Optical Character Recognition) for PDFs, making it possible to search and copy text within documents opened directly in the browser.
What do you think about these new accessibility improvements on Android and Chrome? Let us know in the comments!
