‘Yaaaaaay!’ Google’s latest accessibility tweaks include stretching out captions for emphasis

Plus OCR for PDFs, follow-up questions for TalkBack, smarter Page Zoom, and more!

May 15, 2025 - 18:52

‘Yaaaaaay!’ Google’s latest accessibility tweaks include stretching out captions for emphasis

Google’s celebrating Global Accessibility Awareness Day with some new functionality for Expressive Captions, TalkBack, and more.
TalkBack is gaining support for follow-up questions, letting users ask things like what color objects are.
Chrome also gets some handy upgrades, like OCR for image-based PDF files.

Google’s big developer conference is less than a week away at this point, with Google I/O 2025 kicking off next Tuesday, May 20. Some companies would sit on all their big announcements ahead of an event like that, hoping to aim for maximum fanfare by sharing them all at once, but that is not Google’s MO this time around. Earlier this week we got the scoop on Material 3 Expressive thanks to Google’s Android Show stream, and today we’re learning about a bunch of new features aimed at making the company’s solutions equally usable by everybody, just in time for Global Accessibility Awareness Day.

Live Caption was already a fantastic tool for adding easy-to-read text to media that didn’t natively offer the option, and last winter we saw Google supercharge it with Expressive Captions. In addition to better support for describing sound effects, Expressive Captions could do stuff like formatting text IN ALL CAPS to convey shouting.