New accessibility features
Engaging with educational content online is essential for learning — but a lot of web content isn’t considered accessible. In fact, according to a Google internal study, 360 billion PDFs (making up 12% of all PDFs) don’t work with screen readers today. Now, with the help of AI, a built-in Chrome browser feature on Chromebooks will help screen reader users extract text from PDFs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). We’re bringing the same functionality to ChromeOS.
Reading mode is also getting new features in the next year, like integrated OCR, read aloud and line focus, where ChromeOS will highlight the lines as the text is read aloud.
We’re adding new, natural-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) voices to ChromeOS, too, which can improve reading comprehension (Cunningham, 2011). You’ll find these voices in Text-to-speech voice settings on ChromeOS in the coming months.