Recent Chromebook accessibility updates

[Laura Palmaro]

Hi everyone,

Hope you've been well! We wanted to let you know that as of Chrome milestone 46, the built-in text-to-speech engine in Chrome OS now supports 3 more languages: Dutch, Indonesian, and Hindi. Also, all voices were upgraded with numerous quality improvements and bug fixes. The Chrome OS voices are now the same voices that are used on Android devices, if you are familiar with those.

As always please let us know if you have feedback as you are using your Chromebooks. Your insights are much appreciated!

- Laura

[Gary Morin]

Laura, has there been any work done on speech-to-text and speech commands to manage the Chromebook? I stopped using it a year or two, giving up on Google's efforts to make it accessible to anyone other than sight impaired persons.  Is Google doing anything for Dexterity impaired persons?  Nothing I heard from Google yesterday at a US Federal government accessibility event would suggest so yet. the Presenter was Adrienne Biddings.

Gary

Gary M. Morin
(301) 980-9649 Cell and Text Messaging

[Laura Palmaro]

Hi Gary,

Thanks for the question. Yes, we do have speech to text functionality available now. This is still relatively new, and it's currently a feature that is bundled with the on-screen accessibility keyboard. If you navigate to the accessibility settings, and check the box to enable the on-screen keyboard, then any time you place keyboard focus in a text entry field, the on-screen keyboard will appear. You will notice that there is a little microphone icon in the upper right of the keyboard, and if you click on that icon, you will be able to dictate as your input method. We are brainstorming ways to make this functionality smoother, e.g. making this feature standalone from the on-screen keyboard, and considering a keyboard shortcut to trigger it. But, the functionality is there to dictate text in any text entry field. Please check it out and let us know your thoughts. 

- Laura