[Tn-talk] Making the cloud more accessible

[Sheri Anderson]

Making the cloud more accessible with Chrome and Android
via The Official Google Blog by Emily Wood on 2/28/13

If you’re a blind or low-vision user, you know that working in the
cloud poses unique challenges. Our accessibility team had an
opportunity to address some of those challenges at the 28th annual
CSUN International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference
this week. While there, we led a workshop on how we’ve been improving
the accessibility of Google technologies. For all those who weren’t at
the conference, we want to share just a few of those improvements and
updates:

Chrome and Google Apps

Chrome OS now supports a high-quality text-to-speech voice (starting
with U.S. English). We’ve also made spoken feedback, along with screen
magnification and high-contrast mode available out-of-the-box to make
Chromebook and Chromebox setup easier for users with accessibility
needs.
Gmail now has a consistent navigation interface, backed by HTML5 ARIA,
which enables blind and low-vision users to effectively navigate using
a set of keyboard commands.
It’s now much easier to access content in your Google Drive using a
keyboard—for example, you can navigate a list of files with just the
arrow keys. In Docs, you can access features using the keyboard, with
a new way to search menu and toolbar options. New keyboard shortcuts
and verbalization improvements also make it easier to use Docs, Sheets
and Slides with a screenreader.
The latest stable version of Chrome, released last week, includes
support for the Web Search API, which developers can use to integrate
speech recognition capabilities into their apps. At CSUN, our friends
from Bookshare demonstrated how they use this new functionality to
deliver ReadNow—a fully integrated ebook reader for users with print
disabilities.
Finally, we released a new Help Center Guide specifically for blind
and low-vision users to ease the transition to using Google Apps.

Android

We added Braille support to Android 4.1; since then, Braille support
has been expanded on Google Drive for Android, making it easier to
read and edit your documents. You can also use Talkback with Docs and
Sheets to edit on the go.
With Gesture Mode in Android 4.1, you can reliably navigate the UI
using touch and swipe gestures in combination with speech output.
Screen magnification is now built into Android 4.2—just enable
“Magnification gestures,” then triple tap to enter full screen
magnification.
The latest release of TalkBack (available on Play soon) includes
several highly-requested features like structured browsing of web
content and the ability to easily suspend/resume TalkBack via an
easy-to-use radial menu.

These updates to Chrome, Google Apps, and Android will help create a
better overall experience for our blind and low-vision users, but
there’s still room for improvement. Looking ahead, we’re focused on
the use of accessibility APIs that will make it easier for third-party
developers to create accessible web applications, as well as pushing
the state of the art forward with technologies like speech recognition
and text-to-speech. We’re looking forward to working with the rest of
the industry to make computers and the web more accessible for
everyone.

Posted by T.V. Raman, Engineering Lead, Google Accessibility