In a blog post published Thursday, Google announced new features for Android that are designed to make controlling one’s phone more accessible for disabled people. “Every day, people use voice commands, like ‘Hey Google’, or their hands to navigate their phones. However, that’s not always possible for people with severe motor and speech disabilities,” wrote Lisie Lillianfeld, Product Manager at Google Research and Allen Nikka, Product Manager at Google’s Central Accessibility Team.
As Google says in the post, the new features all are motor-oriented. The company has three: Camera Switches, Project Activate, and Lookout. The latter two are bespoke apps, while Lookout was introduced two years ago and is being updated today.
Camera Switches builds upon Google’s Switch Access feature, introduced in 2015, that allow users with limited (or no) motor control to control their device using physical switches. As the name implies, Camera Switches enable users to control their phone using facial gestures captured by the phone’s selfie cam. The company notes users can select from six different gestures—look right, look left, look up, smile, raise eyebrows, or open your mouth—to trigger actions. You can use these gestures to summon notifications or jump back to the Home Screen. Camera Switches can be used in tandem with physical switches. There are also customization options for determining how long or how big a gesture needs to be in order to be detected by the system.
Google has posted a video to YouTube explaining how Camera Switches work.
Project Activate builds on the concept of gestures-as-control by giving users the ability to perform certain actions (making a phone call, sending a text, etc) with a single gesture. As with Camera Switches, Project Activate is deeply customizable; users can determine actions, they gestures they wish to use, and the sensitivity of the software to said gestures. Project Activate is available in the Google Play Store, and is available in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia in English.
Finally, Google’s Lookout app is being updated to support handwritten text. Lookout allows the Blind and low vision to use their phone’s camera, leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning, to detect physical world items such as food labels and more. Starting today, the Documents mode in Lookout now supports handwritten information from sources such as sticky notes and birthday cards. Additionally, Lookout now supports Euros and Indian Rupees in the app’s Currency Mode.
