Request for Accessibility features

[Sam]

I am a visually impaired Windows user. but I find myself living mostly
on the web now, so the idea of a browser based OS is intriguing to
me. However, as far as I can tell, there aren't a lot of
accessibility functions in this OS.
I am no developer, I don't know if any of this id doable in the
current architecture of Chrome OS, but here are some suggestions.

1. There is a chrome browser extension called Page Reader (which
hasn't been updated for a year, and as far as i can tell, no longer
works). But in concept, it uses Google Translator's Text-to-Speech
engine to read out selected text on a page (assuming the text is
copyable). Google's TTS engine seems to have a unofficial API where
you can send strings of at most 100 characters at a time ina URL and
return a audio file. Of course, pausing and resuming readings would
be great, and doesn't sound impossible if your getting back a audio
file through the API. There will probably more people who wants a
full system wide screen reader (for menus and so on, but this would be
nice start).

2. I know there is already the page zoom-in and zoom-out features,
but a Full Screen Magnification would be useful as well. On Windows,
there's a program called ZoomIt by Sysinternals; it is mostly used for
presentations, but the LiveZoom feature is really handy, I would love
to see it done in Chrome OS.

I hope I don't sound too demanding, but if these features were
implemented into Chrome OS, or at least have extensions that does the
same thing, it would really help people such as myself to take a
closer look at Chrome OS as a viable option for replacing/supplement
to our current OSs.

thank you for considering my ideas.

Sam

[Dominic Mazzoni]

Hi Sam,

Thanks for writing!

You're right that there are several Chrome extensions that offer some accessibility, and we've been working on some of our own, including ChromeVis from Google, which is similar to a screen zoomer. We're also working on making more options for text-to-speech available.

As for making all of Chrome OS accessible, all I can say now is that we're aware of the need and we've got some ideas under development, but we're not ready to announce any specific plans just yet.

- Dominic

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[Sam]

Thank you for the quick reply. I will be eagerly awaiting for those
features. Please focus on the Text-To-Speech features, because I know
a lot of people who really need it.

thanks again

Sam

On Dec 11, 4:32 pm, Dominic Mazzoni <dmazz...@chromium.org> wrote:
> Hi Sam,
>
> Thanks for writing!
>
> You're right that there are several Chrome extensions that offer some
> accessibility, and we've been working on some of our own,
> including ChromeVis from Google, which is similar to a screen zoomer. We're
> also working on making more options for text-to-speech available.
>
> As for making all of Chrome OS accessible, all I can say now is that we're
> aware of the need and we've got some ideas under development, but we're not
> ready to announce any specific plans just yet.
>
> - Dominic
>

> > Chromium OS discuss mailing list: chromium-os-disc...@chromium.org