Google Adds Accessibility Features to Chrome OS with ChromeVox

One area that is seeing some focus at Google lately is accessibility. Most desktop operating system have decent accessibility software and features built-in and you can get powerful software to help all users get through their daily work. On the web though, things are much worse.

Of course, getting all of the web to adapt and implement helpful tools for those with disabilities is close to impossible, however, improving the browsers is much more doable.

Google now has several tools which improve accessibility for its Chrome browser, the latest being ChromeVox, a screen-reader extension and some associated APIs, designed for Chrome and Chrome OS.

"We recently unveiled ChromeVox — a built-in screen reader for Chrome OS — during Google I/O 2011. This is an early developer beta that is designed to help authors of web applications come up to speed with platform accessibility on Chrome OS," T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google, wrote.

"ChromeVox is built as a Chrome extension — this means that unlike most accessibility software, it is built using only web technologies like HTML5, CSS and Javascript," he explained.

"As the built-in accessibility solution for Chrome OS, it can help users with special needs access modern web apps, including those that utilize W3C ARIA (Access to Rich Internet Applications) to provide a rich, desktop-like experience," he added.

ChromeVox can act as a stand-alone screen reader for Chrome OS, but it also enables developers to leverage the feature to automate and customize the process.

It relies a couple of experimental APIs, not yet ready for wide use, experimental.tts API for text to speech, experimental.accessibility API which is designed to add accessibility features to Chrome extensions.

Since it's based on APIs which have not been completed yet, it's not available in the Chrome Web Store and is still intended for early adopters and developers wanting to start building early.