Improvements in Accessibility
Accessing educational content online is crucial for learning. However, much of the online content is not easily accessible. According to a Google internal study, 360 billion PDFs (constituting 12% of all PDFs) are currently not compatible with screen readers. With the assistance of AI, a built-in Chrome browser feature on Chromebooks will now facilitate screen reader users to extract text from PDFs using Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This functionality will also be available on ChromeOS.
New features are being added to the reading mode in the upcoming year, including integrated OCR, read aloud, and line focus, where ChromeOS will highlight the lines as the text is read aloud.
Additionally, new natural-sounding text-to-speech (TTS) voices will be introduced to ChromeOS, aiming to enhance reading comprehension. These voices can be found in the Text-to-speech voice settings on ChromeOS in the coming months.
