Google Upgrades Chrome Accessibility: Image-to-Text Conversion for PDFs
In a recent announcement, Google has revealed plans to enhance the accessibility capabilities of its popular browser, Chrome, by adding an image-to-text conversion feature specifically designed for PDF files. This innovative OCR-style technology will greatly benefit visually impaired users who rely on screen readers.
Helping Visually Impaired Users Access PDF Content
Google’s new image-to-text conversion feature is aimed at making PDFs more accessible even when they lack alt text descriptions. Alt text is an essential component for visually impaired users, as it provides short descriptions of images that can be read by screen readers. However, there is still a significant number of PDFs without this crucial information.
The company’s internal analysis indicates that more than 360 billion PDFs are currently inaccessible to users with disabilities who depend on screen readers. With the introduction of this new OCR technology, Google aims to bridge this gap and make the digital world more inclusive.
Optical Character Recognition: Converting Images into Text
Using advanced optical character recognition (OCR) technology, Chrome’s image-to-text conversion will transform images in PDF documents into machine-readable text. This means that when a user comes across a PDF file without alt text, the screen reader will be able to convert the image to text and read it aloud for the user’s comprehension.
This groundbreaking feature builds upon Chrome’s existing functionality introduced in 2019, which offered descriptions of unlabeled images with the help of screen readers. This paved the way for better accessibility in web content and the browser itself.
Availability and Future Developments
Initially, Google plans to roll out this feature exclusively for Chrome under ChromeOS. However, based on previous patterns such as the release timeline of reading mode which was initially exclusive to ChromeOS but later expanded to all editions of Chrome, it is safe to assume that availability will eventually broaden to include other platforms as well.
While Google has not yet announced an exact release date, they expect the new image-to-text conversion feature to be ready in the coming months.
Reading Mode Expansion for Enhanced Accessibility
In addition to the new image-to-text capability, Google is expanding its reading mode feature—an essential tool for improving text readability in the browser. Initially launched as a ChromeOS-exclusive feature in March 2019, reading mode will soon be accessible on all computers via the Chrome browser.
Reading mode allows users to customize settings like typeface, font size, spacing, and text and background color. Additionally, users can choose to remove distracting elements such as videos and images from web pages, letting them focus more on the content.