Google Celebrated Global Accessibility Awareness Day with These Features on Android and Chrome

On May 16, 2025, Google marked Global Accessibility Awareness Day by introducing new features across Android and Chrome. These features focused mainly on enhancing digital accessibility for its users, especially on Android and Chrome.

The first feature revealed that Android’s TalkBack screen reader will now be integrated with Gemini AI. With this, users can receive detailed image descriptions and ask follow-up questions about visual content, such as identifying objects or colors.

This feature extends to entire screens, enabling users to inquire about items like clothing materials or available discounts while shopping.

Also read: These 5 Chromebook Features Make Classrooms More Accessible and Inclusive for Students with Disabilities

The next feature is “Expressive Captions”, which provides real-time captions that capture emotions and non-verbal sounds, in addition to the usual spoken words. This would mean that the caption would now include something like whistling or throat-clearing. This feature is currently available in English on devices running Android 15 or later in the U.S., U.K., Canada, and Australia.

Chrome on Android also has a new customizable Page Zoom feature. This , allowing users to adjust text size without affecting the overall webpage layout.

Chrome on Android also has a new customizable Page Zoom feature. This allows users to adjust text size without affecting the overall webpage layout.

On desktop, Chrome’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tool now automatically detects text in scanned PDFs. Users can now highlight, copy, search, and use screen readers with the content.

Such updates, especially on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, reflect how Google is committed to making digital experiences more accessible and inclusive for its users around the world.