Android updates TalkBack screen reader with new voice commands, language options

Google on Tuesday shared a series of updates to its TalkBack screen reader for Android. First launched in 2009, TalkBack reads aloud what’s on a display screen for customers who’re blind or low imaginative and prescient, navigates via apps, and facilitates communication with braille, voice and keyboard enter. The new, “highly requested” features embody expanded gesture and navigation choices, simplified menus, new voice instructions and extra language choices. (Learn extra about adjustments Google additionally made to Maps, Messages and Assistant.)

Customers now have a dozen “easy-to-learn and easy-to-use multi-finger gestures,” Google says, which make it simpler to work together with apps and carry out actions corresponding to choosing and enhancing textual content, and controlling media. As an example, as a substitute of going via a number of menus and bulletins to start out or cease a podcast, now you can simply double faucet the display screen with two fingers. This replace is obtainable by way of the most recent model of TalkBack on Pixel and Samsung Galaxy gadgets from One UI 3 and up.

Google can be changing the a number of menus — which it says customers discovered complicated — right into a single menu that adapts to the present context and provides common entry to necessary capabilities. So, for instance, actions like hyperlink navigation or enhancing controls solely present up in the event that they’re related to the present context, the corporate says.

Moreover, customers can now learn or skim by swiping. For instance, they will swipe proper or left with three fingers to only hear headlines, hear word-by-word or character-by-character. With a single swipe up or down, they will navigate via textual content.  

With TalkBack 9.1 and up, swiping up and proper launches the brand new voice instructions, which can lead the display screen reader to cease speaking and hear in your directions. There are greater than 25 instructions, corresponding to “discover” to find textual content on the display screen or “improve speech charge” to make TalkBack communicate quicker.

Customers can even add or take away choices within the TalkBack menu or studying controls and might assign or reassign gestures to completely different settings, navigation controls and actions. Google can be including help for Arabic and Spanish in TalkBack’s braille keyboard.

Within the final a number of months, Google has up to date different accessibility choices together with Voice Entry, which lets individuals navigate their telephones with their voice, and Lookout, which helps people who find themselves blind or low-vision establish meals labels, pinpoint objects in a room, and scan paperwork and forex. Different large tech corporations, together with Twitter, Fb and Apple, have additionally launched extra accessibility options amid rising consciousness of the disparities that exist for individuals with disabilities, notably because the coronavirus pandemic has made individuals extra reliant on digital interactions.