[MUSIC PLAYING]
LAURA D'AQUILA: I have sensorineural hearing loss
in both ears.
It was something that I was born with.
Growing up, I did rely on various pieces
of assistive technology.
And that kind of always led me motivated to want
to go into this field and be able to make a difference.
I'm Laura D'Aquila, and I'm a software engineer
on Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides Accessibility.
ABIGAIL KLEIN: We are completely focused
on accessibility for the different products
that we work on.
I'm Abigail Klein, and I'm a software engineer
on Google Chrome Accessibility.
We do a lot of things related to accessibility
and trying to learn about our users
and what will make the experience the most
accessible experience possible.
We work with people who have disabilities
so we can learn from them firsthand
on what are some of the challenges that they face.
LAURA D'AQUILA: So because of my hearing loss,
sometimes when I would be in meetings
or other types of presentations at work,
it could be a little bit more difficult
for me to follow along.
It depends a lot on the particular audio setup
of the room and whether a microphone is used.
And there were a couple of situations
where I would actually be at a presentation,
but I would just find that it wasn't
worth my time to be there because of the audio setting.
And as a result, I would leave some of those presentations
early.
ABIGAIL KLEIN: We realized that maybe we
could use some of the technology that Google had already
built for speech-to-text that's already
being used for the Google Assistant
and for another other products.
So we realized, hey, we could use that technology
to build captions that somebody could
use during a presentation.
And then maybe that would help Laura and other people
like her be able to follow along.
We are really fortunate that our team has
a hackathon every six months.
Basically, what it is is it's an opportunity for developers, UX,
PM, to put aside their regular jobs
and just work on whatever they feel like working on.
The fact that we are able to build the prototype in a week
demonstrated that, hey, we could build this whole thing
at a production level quality and be able to deploy it
pretty quickly.
So this is definitely worth us investing in and actually
building out.
LAURA D'AQUILA: The particular API
that Abigail and I had used for sides captions-- that's
Google's Cloud Speech API.
It's publicly available.
It's free to get started with.
And you can easily hook that up into any application
you might be working on that needs
voice input, or captioning, or any other type
of speech-to-text application.
We had a user experience researcher that we worked with.
And this researcher showed prototypes of the feature
to actual users.
And from there, we iterated on feedback that we received.
One of the great pieces of feedback that we received
was just the fact that this feature can be so useful,
not only for those who are deaf or hard of hearing,
but also just everybody who's in the presentation.
MARTIN CISNEROS: My name is Martin Cisneros.
I'm an academic technology specialist here
with the Santa Clara County Office of Education.
When I first learned about closed captioning
for Google Slides, I thought it was a huge game changer.
So with closed captioning, being an educator
for English language learners has always
been a push of how can I find technology
that will enhance their development in the language.
One of my thoughts was like, well, just grab a slide,
put the topic on at the very top,
and put the essential question on the bottom.
What are you talking about?
And then just hit Play.
Hit Closed Captioning.
And let that be a different way of using the tool.
You are going to have your students who
aren't English language learners who that's going to benefit.
And that's a great one.
You have your other kids who have hard of hearing.
That's going to be beneficial as well.
If you are already an outstanding teacher
and you want to enhance your reach with students,
technology like this can really benefit not only your students,
but your whole community-- your whole learning community
as well.
ABIGAIL KLEIN: If you're able to position yourself or meet
people who have a lot of diverse perspectives
from yourself, put yourself out there,
try to meet people who are really different from you.
And then you can really learn about, as Laura was saying,
hey, how would somebody use my product if they can't see it,
if they can't type on the keyboard.
LAURA D'AQUILA: There's never just going
to be a one size fits all answer for accessibility.
There are many, many different types of disabilities.
Oftentimes, some people might have multiple disabilities.
And it's just so important to be working directly
with these communities to make sure
that you're building something that can actually be useful.
So we were confident in what we launched
would be helpful to our users.