For as many incredible things that our phones and computers can do, it’s easy to forget that not everyone’s able to interact with these systems in the same way. Google has thankfully beena trailblazer when it comes to accessibility, including making web content available to everyone.Chrome’s reading modeand PDF viewer are both part of this commitment, and can be invaluable to those with visual impairments. Now a new image-to-text feature in Chrome on ChromeOS will help screen readers work with PDFs, even when images lack alt-text descriptions.
Theimage-to-textfunctionality allows users to get a description of images in PDFs without alt text. AI can analyze the contents of picture and identify what’s in it, and then for text that’s saved as an image, there’s OCR technology to turn it back into text. Either way we go, the system generates machine-accessible text that can then be output by a screen reader.
People with visual impairments can have a hard time exploring and interacting with PDFs with alt text often missing or incomplete. Image-to-text may reduce the need for alt text in the first place, and could be used in other Chrome features, likereading mode.
Chrome already had its reading mode on ChromeOS, and now Google shares that the feature is expanding to the browser on all computers, ensuring a broader audience can take advantage of it. Reading mode has some bugs, like sometimes not loading the whole page or having issues on sites with a paywall, but we’re still happy to see Google prioritizing its development and increasing the reach of accessibility features. Maybe we’ll one day see a version of it for PDFs? Features like these should drive more people to use Google’s own reading mode, instead of the third-party apps found on the Chrome store.
