On its official blog, Google has just presented new features for Chrome. Centered around accessibility, the idea is to make its browser and OS easier to use for people with visual and hearing impairments.
With several billion daily users on its various applications, Google has been constantly improving the experience for several years. This includes features focused on accessibility. A key element to allow all users, including those with visual, hearing, or motor impairments, to benefit as much as possible from the American firm's services.
In October 2023, for example, Google rolled out a wide range of new tools such as voice synthesis for Live View on Google Maps, the complete customization of routines on the Google Assistant, and the arrival of the guide for framing your photos on older-generation Pixels.
Now, on this Friday, May 16, 2025, World Accessibility Awareness Day, Google has just presented new features for Chrome.
Chrome is full of accessibility tools
First of all, the Mountain View firm announced news regarding reading PDFs on Chrome. Until now, it was impossible to select, copy/paste, or print text from of a scanned PDF file. Additionally, people with disabilities were also unable to use audio description and screen readers to decipher these documents.
Good news, this is no longer the case. Now, thanks to optical character recognition (OCR), Chrome can highlight, copy/paste, or search text from a PDF. The screen reader can also read them for you.
But that's not all. The Android version of Chrome welcomes an improvement that users have been asking for for a while: smarter zoom management. Until now, zooming in on the text on a web page tended to mess up the layout. Which could affect readability.
Zooming on Android now works the same way as on the Desktop version of Chrome. Therefore, zooming no longer affects the text layout. The presentation automatically adapts to the size of your screen depending on the zoom level applied. Available now, this feature is located in the three-dot menu in the top right corner. A nice feature is that you can set zoom preferences to apply them to all the sites you visit.
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