Google is adding a new image-to-text conversion tool to Google Chrome, an accessibility feature that is designed to help users who depend on screen readers. According to an internal Google analysis, more than 360 billion PDFs are inaccessible for users who are blind or have low vision and rely on readers.
"Over the last 30 years, there’s been a major push for web developers and content-creation tools to make their products accessible. But the reality is many PDFs are still inaccessible," Google said in a blog post.
As the name suggests, the tool is meant to pull text content from PDFs with the help of optical character recognition (OCR), a process that converts an image of text into a machine-readable format. After that, the extracted text can then be read aloud by the browser"s built-in screen reader. The tool builds on top of an existing feature that is used to get descriptions of unlabeled images in the Chrome browser.
Google said that the text-to-image tool will be available in the Chrome browser on ChromeOS. It added that Chrome"s reading mode, which is currently limited to ChromeOS, will be rolled out to all computers in the coming months.
The announcement was made at the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) education technology conference in Philadelphia where the company is making an official presence. For its education customers, Google has introduced a new app hub where admins can find apps that can connect with Google for Education tools and Chromebooks. Admins can also use the hub to license apps easily and manage them from the Google Admin console.
Admins can leverage new device management tools to customize how students and teachers access websites and apps. For instance, ChromeOS Data Controls allow them to set up rules to prevent copy and paste from specific websites, screen capture, and printing.
The search giant has also introduced some new education features in Google Meet such as Q&A, polling, and tile pairing which allows two people to be highlighted simultaneously whenever one of them speaks. For instance, a video presenter can be paired with a sign-language interpreter. Also, for Education Plus customers, Google has increased the number of maximum attendees to 1,000.