Continue the Google’s plan to make its services and products more accessible. The web giant announced today that it will make it easier for users with low vision to interact with PDF files in Chrome.
Indeed, the American company has implemented optical character recognition (OCR) technology to your browser, which will then be able to convert PDF files into text format to make them more accessible. In this way, screen readers used by those who suffer from impaired vision and who are able to read documents, will also be able to read PDF files.
Compared to now, the step forward is significant, since PDFs are usually excluded as they are encoded and include alphanumeric characters that are not always understandable.
The tool developed by Google will also be able to provide image descriptions.
“In 2019, we launched the ability to get image descriptions, via Chrome, even for those sites that didn’t have alt text behind each photo. Today we build on this technology to add even more functionality to pdfs. When a screen reader user comes across a file that has no alt text (a description of the image embedded and readable by screen readers), Chrome will be able to convert the image to text and read it aloudChromeOS’ Jonathan Bernal explained.
Meanwhile, a few days ago some interesting news related to AI on Chrome were announced.