Google’s AI-based new visual accessibility tool in Chrome
A large portion of the content on the internet is visual, and unless website creators use alt text to label their images, it’s hard for users of screen readers or Braille displays to know what they show.
To address the issue, Google has launched a new Chrome tool that allows developers to mimic visual impairments like color blindness to help them fix accessibility issues on their sites.
Google is using the same technology in Google Lens and Google Photos to offer a more accurate image context for those who need it. The machine learning technology will try to recognize the unlabeled image and provide a better description.
The feature is available only for users with screen readers that output spoken feedback or Braille. The images descriptions will be read by the screen reader, but will not appear visually on the screen.
With this new feature, users will get a spoken descriptive text that will describe the image on their screen. For instance, an image at a market stall could be described as “appears to be fruits and vegetables at the market.”
Mathias Bynes, a Google employee working on developer tools for Chrome, tweeted a demo video showing how you can test your website for various visual deficiency parameters.
