Co-creating a world where people with disabilities can thrive

We’re developing tools that tap into the power of gesture-led communication to help people communicate, use technology, and reach their goals. We’re early on in this journey, but we’re excited to see what possibilities this new technology can unlock.

For example, Project Gameface is an open-source, hands-free gaming mouse that enables people to control a computer's cursor using their head movement and facial gestures, designed in collaboration with Lance Carr, a quadriplegic video game streamer. Another example is PopSign, a game developed by students from the Georgia Institute of Technology and the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology along with Google engineers and the Kaggle community. PopSign uses AI to help everyone – including Deaf children and their caregivers – become more confident at using sign language.

More than 250 million people around the world experience difficulty making their words understood due to non-standard speech. That’s why we designed Project Relate, an Android app offering personalized speech recognition to help people with non-standard speech communicate more easily in face-to-face conversations. Developed through years of research and based on speech samples contributed by more than 1,000 individuals, the app is now available in beta in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the United States.

With Google Maps, our goal is to build a better, more helpful map for everyone, including the tens of millions of people worldwide who use wheelchairs. Since 2020, the Accessible Places feature in Google Maps has made it easier to identify whether a place has a wheelchair-accessible entrance, indicated by the wheelchair icon. More information – like wheelchair-accessible seating, parking, and restrooms – is also available, helping people plan visits with confidence.

As of 2023, we’re able to provide wheelchair accessibility information for more than 40 million businesses around the world. This work is made possible by more than 120 million Local Guides who’ve responded to our call to share accessibility information, as well as decades of advocacy by individuals and groups fighting for equal access for people with disabilities. Were it not for them, there would be far fewer accessible places for Google Maps to show.

With built-in accessibility features, Google for Education helps students and educators customize their learning tools and create inclusive learning environments so they can learn, teach, and collaborate with confidence. Products like Chromebooks, Classroom, and Assignments are designed to support the individual learning styles of everyone who uses them, including students with disabilities. Students and educators can customize their learning tools and create inclusive learning environments where they can learn, teach, and collaborate with confidence. Explore accessibility features and learning resources here.

We’re excited about the power that AI has to help people with disabilities more easily communicate, access information, and achieve their unique goals. Here are some of our latest AI-driven innovations designed in collaboration with the blind and low-vision community:

• Lookout uses AI to help people explore the world and accomplish everyday tasks, like sorting mail and putting away groceries. Now this Android feature is even more powerful with the addition of Image Q&A, which generates image descriptions and answers any follow-up questions you ask using your voice or typing. The app recently became available in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, bringing the total number of supported languages to 34.
  
• Based on our internal analysis, there are more than 360 billion PDFs online that are inaccessible for people who rely on screen readers. With the help of AI, we're creating a built-in Chrome browser feature that extracts text from PDFs, enabling blind and low-vision readers to access these documents using screen readers.
  
• We recently added new functionality and features to our TalkBack screen reader for Android and WearOS, which people in the blind and low-vision community can use to read, write, navigate apps, and more.

We’re working to improve representation of people with disabilities by including more members of the disability community in datasets and reference sources. For AI, that means specifically training our image technology on thousands of photos of people from every background, including individuals with chronic conditions and disabilities, as well as people across the gender spectrum and models with darker skin tones. More representative data sets means better experiences for everyone on products like Google Photos, Google Pixel, and Pixel cameras.

In 2022 we launched the Accessibility Discovery Centre in London. It’s a space where our engineers, researchers, product teams, and partners can explore and build new kinds of accessible technologies. Built in consultation with Google’s Disability Alliance employee resource group and local partners like the U.K.’s Royal National Institute of Blind People and Royal National Institute for Deaf People, the Centre builds on our years of investment and innovation in helpful and accessible technology. Since then, we’ve expanded to Dublin, Zurich, and Dubai.

We’re taking what we learn and applying it in our events and partnerships, with the goal of inspiring change across the creative industry. As the first official accessibility partner of Cannes Lions, we’re working with Cannes to make sure the festival is built with people with disabilities in mind. This includes providing sign language interpreters and using Live Transcribe for real-time captioning. We also ensure that the Google Beach, our home base at Cannes, is wheelchair-accessible and provides CART captioning, Live Transcribe for real-time captioning, and ASL interpreters.