As part of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Google announced a number of updates across Android, Chrome, and other services, including an image Q&A feature in Lookout.
Live Caption, which generates real-time captions on Android, Chrome, and Google Meet, is coming to more devices and people “this summer.” It’s being optimized for Android tablets with a “new captions box” as part of the broader large screen push.
Similarly, the ability to essentially respond to Live Caption by typing out responses that will be read aloud to the caller on the other end is “expanding to Pixel 4 and 5, as well as additional Android devices, like select Samsung Galaxy phones, and others.” Similarly, the Pixel 4, 5, and other devices are getting support for Live Caption in French, Italian, and German.
Lookout is readying a new image Q&A feature that uses a Google DeepMind visual language model (Flamingo) to describe images that do not have alt text. In turn, people can then ask multiple questions about the image either via voice or typing.
For example, Lookout can analyze a picture of a dog running on a beach and generate the following description: “In this image, I can see a dog is running on the sand. I can also see a ball in its mouth. In the background, I can see the water, mountains, and the sky.” Someone can then ask, “Does the dog look playful?” And Google will return, “Yes, the dog is playful.”
Following months of internal testing with people with blindness and low-vision, we’re working with the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) to invite a limited number of people to test out this feature with plans to make it available to even more people soon.
In Maps, Google is elevating making the wheelchair-accessible place icon more prominent, while Chrome can “now detect URL typos and suggest websites based on the corrections.”
This increases accessibility for people with dyslexia, language learners, and anyone who makes typos by making it easier to get to previously visited websites despite spelling errors. This feature is now available on Chrome desktop and will roll out to mobile in the coming months.
Talkback in Chrome for Android has been updated to analyze the Tab Grid with support for Tab Groups, bulk tab actions, and reordering.
Lastly, Google is reiterating Wear OS 4’s upcoming “text-to-speech experience that is faster and more reliable.” It follows the addition of two new sound and display modes on Wear OS 3
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