'Yaaaaaay!' Google's latest accessibility tweaks include stretching out captions for emphasis
Ryan Haines / Android Authority
TL;DR Google's celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day with some new functionality for Expressive Captions, TalkBack, and more.
TalkBack is gaining support for follow-up questions, letting users ask things like what color objects are.
Chrome also gets some handy upgrades, like OCR for image-based PDF files.
Google's big developer conference is less than a week away at this point, with Google I/O 2025 kicking off next Tuesday, May 20. Some companies would sit on all their big announcements ahead of an event like that, hoping to aim for maximum fanfare by sharing them all at once, but that is not Google's MO this time around. Earlier this week we got the scoop on Material 3 Expressive thanks to Google's Android Show stream, and today we're learning about a bunch of new features aimed at making the company's solutions equally usable by everybody, just in time for Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
Live Caption was already a fantastic tool for adding easy-to-read text to media that didn't natively offer the option, and last winter we saw Google supercharge it with Expressive Captions. In addition to better support for describing sound effects, Expressive Captions could do stuff like formatting text IN ALL CAPS to convey shouting.
Now Google is further upgrading Expressive Captions still, giving it support for not just recognizing new sounds, but also learning to express drawn-out utterances by repeating letters. Yesssssss!
Google
Last year at I/O, Google shared that Android's TalkBack screen reader was getting a Gemini-powered upgrade, learning to describe photos using on-device processing. Now Google's making that a whole lot more conversational by letting users ask specific questions about photos, prompting TalkBack to follow up with more detail. Anything appearing on screen is fair game, so your questions don't have to be specifically about pictures.
PDFs can be really hit-or-miss when it comes to accessibility, and while some are going to be nicely formatted text documents that are perfect for something like TalkBack to read to you, other times we're stuck with a scanned image. Thankfully, Google is doing something about just that, and shares that Chrome for desktop is picking up the ability to perform optical character recognition (OCR) on such image-based PDFs. More than just helping support screen readers, that also means it's going to be easy to copy text right out of them.
Google
Chrome's also getting some special attention on Android with improvements to how Page Zoom works. Google's fixing how zoomed-in webpages maintain proper formatting, and letting you save custom Page Zoom settings for different sites.
Those are the biggies among Google's GAAD announcements, and amount to some very useful-sounding upgrades to the company's suite of accessibility solutions. Beyond these, Google also shares news about improved tools for students using Chromebooks and some of its speech-recognition efforts for non-standard speakers and across additional languages. You can check out the full details of those on Google's blog.
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