Improving speech recognition around the world
In 2019, we launched Project Euphonia to find ways to make speech recognition more accessible for people with non-standard speech. Now we’re supporting developers and organizations around the world as they bring that work to even more languages and cultural contexts.
New developer resources
To improve the ecosystem of tools globally, we’re providing developers with our open-source repositories via Project Euphonia’s GitHub page. They can now develop personalized audio tools for research or train their models for diverse speech patterns.
Support for new projects in Africa
Earlier this year we partnered with Google.org to provide support to the University College London in their creation of the Centre for Digital Language Inclusion (CDLI). The CDLI is working to improve speech recognition technology for non-English speakers in Africa by creating open-source datasets in 10 African languages, building new speech recognition models and continuing to support the ecosystem of organizations and developers in this space.
Expanding accessibility options for students
Accessibility tools can be particularly helpful for students with disabilities, from using facial gestures to navigate their Chromebooks with Face Control to customizing their reading experience with Reading Mode.
And now when you use your Chromebook with College Board’s Bluebook testing app (which is where students can take the SAT and most Advanced Placement exams) you’ll have access to all of Google’s built-in accessibility features. This includes ChromeVox screen reader and Dictation, along with College Board’s own digital testing tools.
Making Chrome more accessible
With more than 2 billion people using Chrome each day, we’re always striving to make our browser easier to use and more accessible for everyone with features like Live Caption and image descriptions for screen reader users.
Access PDFs more easily on Chrome
Previously, if you opened a scanned PDF in your desktop Chrome browser, you wouldn’t be able to use your screen reader to interact with it. Now with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Chrome automatically recognizes these types of PDFs, so you can highlight, copy and search for text like any other page and use your screen reader to read them.
Read with ease with Page Zoom
Page Zoom now lets you increase the size of the text you see in Chrome on Android without affecting the webpage layout or your browsing experience — just like how it works on Chrome desktop. You can customize how much you want to zoom in and easily apply the preference to all the pages you visit or just specific ones.