Google Adds Braille Support to Sheets, Magnifier Tool to Slides and Drawings

January 09, 2018

Google announced today that the G-Suite team is adding new accessibility features to Google Sheets, Slides, and Drawings. Specifically, Google Sheets is getting Braille support and Google Slides and Drawings are getting screen magnifier support.

Braille displays can already be used to read and edit texts in Docs, Slides, and Drawings. With the added support for Sheets, users will now be able to read and edit cell contents, as well as navigate between cells on a sheet. According to Google’s blog post, this will only be available on Chrome OS with the ChromeVox screen reader, for now. The company says it is working to add support for other platforms and screen readers.

Google is also adding screen magnifier support to Slides and Drawings, in addition to the existing support for Docs and Sheets. This option can be used on Mac and Chrome OS devices.

With accessibility features becoming available on an increasing number of apps and platforms, blind people (about 39 million globally) and the visually impaired (about 245 million) can perform tasks they otherwise could not have. (Being visually impaired myself, I use screen magnifiers on a daily basis as they allow me to more easily perform my job as a reporter.)

Source: Venture Beat