October was America's Disability Awareness Month (National Disability Employment Awareness Month), a good opportunity to address the issue of accessibility in Businesses.
What do we mean when we talk about accessibility? An interesting thought comes from Roger Benz, Program Manager Accessibility G Suite.
"You should not only make sure that your office or store is accessible to employees and customers who have mobility difficulties, but also worry that applications, digital tools, and content are accessible to everyone!"
We would like to remind you, thanks to Roger's contribution, of some of the G Suite features that urge collaboration and especially inclusion, so that you can also make the most of them in your Company with all your colleagues or employees.
Listen to content with the help of Screen Readers
A Screen Reader is a useful tool for people who are blind or visually impaired. It provides methods to interact and control applications and also converts content to spoken text.
To enable it go to Google Documents, Presentations or Sheets click on the Documents item, then on Accessibility Settings. Select the Enable Screen Reader item.
G Suite supports several Screen Reader, including ChromeVox. You just need to enable it because it is automatically integrated into Chrome devices, such as Chromebooks. This will verbalize content aloud using text-to-speech (TTS). The power2Cloud team also tried it, it works perfectly!
Consult the summary of changes in your Documents
To keep track of contributions from people who work with you in Google Docs, a feature called Live Edits was recently added. Useful if you use a Screen Reader, Live Edits periodically summarizes changes made to a Document by contributors within the sidebar.
To track the changes of all your contributors:
- Make sure you have enabled support for the Screen Reader.
- Use the keyboard shortcut to find all your contributors' changes in real time:
- Windows and Chrome OS: CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + R
- Mac: ⌘ + OPTION + SHIFT + R
For people who are sensitive to visual crowding, big G has introduced eight different Lexend font families that have different widths and spacing to enable clearer and faster reading. You can choose them by selecting Other Fonts in the list already available.
Use voice typing to write by speaking
Speech typing is a powerful productivity tool, for everyone. And it is especially useful for people with visual impairments or motor disabilities that may prevent them from using keyboards, mice, or trackpads. You can activate it by selecting under Tools the Vocal Typing item.
When you speak into the computer microphone, voice typing uses artificial intelligence (AI) to convert your voice into text. In Documents, you can even use voice commands to select and edit text, such as bold words or cut and paste text.
Add subtitles to the slides of the Presentationsi
If you are presenting slides or during a video meeting, you can add subtitles. Use the shortcut for your browser:
- Chrome OS or Windows: CTRL+MAIUSC+C
- Mac: ⌘+MAIUSC+C
Then click CC in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen to choose text position and size.
It is not necessary to write subtitles. The computer's microphone and Google's machine learning tools automatically create subtitles as you speak and display them at the bottom of the screen.