Our approach to accessibility

Google’s mission to make the world’s information more accessible applies to all users, including people with disabilities, such as blindness, visual impairment, color deficiency, deafness, hearing loss and limited dexterity.

Specifically, we achieve this goal by:

• Building in accessibility into key Google products
• Developing accessibility APIs and services for Google Android and ChromeOS platforms
• Supporting open standards to ensure that the greater Web is accessible through all adaptive technologies.

We’ve found that providing alternative access modes like keyboard shortcuts, captions, high-contrast views and text-to-speech technology helps everyone, not just people with disabilities.  For example, keyboard shortcuts help power users get things done more quickly without using a mouse, speech-to-text technology enables people to skim and search audio content, and custom product themes give people more opportunities to personalize their overall user experience.

As we continually work to advance the objectives above, we are pushing the frontiers of research and development in this space to further enable people with disabilities. We hope to have a positive impact on the current state of accessibility on the Web,  and to serve an ever-larger numbers of users.