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[voiceover] What's New in Accessibility at Google
Hi, everyone!
I'm Laura, Head of Strategy and Programs
for Accessibility & Disability Inclusion here at Google.
Welcome back to What's New in Google Accessibility,
a series where every few months,
we discuss updates that make our products more accessible for everyone.
In this episode, we'll share some highlights from Google I/O,
which happened in May, and we'll tell you about new features
we're launching and products like Google Maps, Android, Chrome and more.
In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day in May, Google writers collected
some of their favorite tips for creating accessible, inclusive content.
In five short videos, they offer practical advice for how to use inclusive
language, create informative headings and reduce reliance on visual cues.
Find these resources and video links at
goo.gle/accessible-content
At this year's Google I/O, we showcased a number of projects
that are advancing accessibility technology.
First up, we announced the American Fingerspelling Competition on Kaggle.
Kaggle is an online community
of data scientists and machine learning practitioners.
The goal of the competition is to create a model that can quickly
and accurately identify American Sign Language fingerspelling-
where each letter of a word is spelled out in ASL rapidly using a single hand,
rather than using this specific signs for the entire words-
and then translated into written text.
Participants will create a model trained with the largest dataset of it's kind
released specifically for this competition.
The data includes more than 3 million fingerspelled characters
produced by over 100 Deaf signers.
To announce the competition,
we released a music video with a deaf musician and rapper San Forbes.
We’ll link to it, along with the Kaggle Competition site
in the description of this video.
We also showcased Popsign, an AI-powered
educational game that helps families learn sign language.
Learning sign language can be challenging, especially for new parents of deaf children
who want to pick up the language quickly and fluently.
Popsign will hopefully make this process a bit easier and more accessible.
The project is led by the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Rochester
Institute of Technology, Google Engineers, and the Kaggle community.
Visit Popsign.org, and check out the I/O video
linked on their website to learn more.
And we shared Project Game Face at I/O,
a new open-source hands-free gaming mouse that enables users to control
their computer’s cursor using their head movements and facial gestures,
which can be particularly useful for people with mobility disabilities.
In addition to these announcements, we hosted several accessibility
themed sessions at I/O, like “What's new in Android Accessibility”
and “Embrace Accessibility for more beautiful products with material designs.”
You can find these and more linked in the description of this video.
In Google Maps News,
we've made an update to the Accessible Places feature.
Since 2020 people located in certain countries have been able to opt-in
to Accessible Places, which helps identify when a place has
a wheelchair-accessible entrance indicated by the wheelchair icon.
Now, we’re making the icon visible for everyone on Maps
for more than 40 million locations,
so you can know before you go if there's a step-free entrance,
which is helpful whether you're using a wheelchair,
pushing a stroller or even lugging a suitcase.
You can also find other information - like availability of hearing loops,
wheelchair-accessible seating, restrooms or parking -
in the about tab.
On Android,
we announced Lookout Image Question & Answer (Q&A) mode -
a new AI-based feature that integrates a Google DeepMind
visual language model to make digital images more accessible.
Lookout, which was launched in 2019 and designed with the blind
and low-vision community, uses AI to help people accomplish everyday tasks,
like sorting mail and putting away groceries.
Digital images have been found in some studies to be 99% inaccessible to blind people.
Now, whether or not images have captions or alt text,
Lookout can process the image and provide a description of it
so people can use their voice or type to ask questions
and have a more detailed understanding of what's in an image.
We've invited a limited number of users to test out this feature
with plans to make it available to more people soon.
We're also rolling out updates to Live Caption,
our AI-powered feature that provides real time captions for anything
with sound on your Android device and across your phone and desktop
using Chrome and Google Meet.
Good boy Chester,
Are you ready to show everyone your new tricks?
This summer will bring: A new captions box
that optimizes the Live Caption experience on Android tablets.
New availability
for a Live Caption for calls feature, allowing you to type back responses
during calls and have the response read aloud to the other caller.
And language expansion to French, Italian and German
for more Pixel models.
On Chrome for Android, you can now easily increase the size of content -
including text images, video and interactive controls - by up
to 300% to suit your vision preferences while still preserving the page layout.
And you can set your preferred content size as a default
so you don't have to change it every time you open up Chrome.
In more Chrome News, Reading mode - our that makes reading
easier and more accessible - is coming to the Chrome browser.
A customizable reader view will allow users to reduce
distracting elements on the screen, like images and videos
to help you focus on the page's primary content.
This feature can be helpful for people with learning disabilities like dyslexia.
Thanks for tuning into another episode of What's New in Google Accessibility.
We really hope that you enjoyed
learning about some of the latest updates to our products and features.
To learn more, sign up for our accessibility newsletter
at g.co/a11y/news
or by clicking the link in the description of this video.
Stay tuned for another episode in a few months.
Bye for now.
[voiceover] What's New in Accessibility at Google