Global accessibility awareness Day is Thursday, so both Apple and Google announced that this week's devices have many new accessibility features, all of which are appropriate, all of which are scheduled to land in the coming year.

First, let's talk about Apple. The title is Mac's magnifying glass support. This integrates with the accessibility reader, so you can use your iPhone camera to enlarge the whiteboard in the distance or zoom in on it on your MacBook screen, adjust the contrast and color to make it clearer, or extract the text into your favorite format.

For deaf and hearing-impaired people, Apple enhances live listening by adding live subtitle support and extending it to the Apple Watch. You can use your iPhone's microphone to enhance the audio of the Airpods or a hearing aid for real-time listening, but there are real-time subtitles that you can transcribe immediately on your wrist. The Apple Watch can also be used as a capture remote, so you can bring your iPhone close to the speakers (perfect for meetings, classrooms, or lecture halls). If you miss something and check the transcript later, you can also rewind it.

Other notable additional features include Braille Access, which turns your Apple device (iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Vision Pro) into Braille Note Taker, enhanced eye and head tracking for iPhone and iPhone, and a new accessibility nutrition tag in the App Store, which will allow people to see what they see in Appability while the Accessibility access feature or game support. You can find the full list on the Apple website. -Simon Hill

Google has accessibility updates for Android and Chrome

Google's accessibility update focuses on existing Android and Chrome features, as well as some new features for Chromebooks in classrooms.

AI’s ruthless drives have enabled Google’s Gemini to enhance several existing services, such as Android’s Talkback screen reader, which provides AI-generated image descriptions for low vision and blind people. The company is expanding the integration, so you can now ask questions about these images, maybe the material of the clothes in the picture or learn the make and model of the car. Google also relies on AI to enhance its expressive titles to convey more emotions and tone.

Improvements to Chrome allow you to interact with PDFs using a screen reader to read, highlight, search and copy text like any other page. Page Zoom has also been improved on Chrome on Android, so you can increase the text size without affecting the webpage layout and customize the preferred zoom level for different pages, making it consistent with Chrome on your desktop.

For students using Chromebooks in class, Google enables hands-free navigation with facial controls that track facial movements using a webcam. The CARET browsing setting allows people with visual impairments to browse and interact with web pages using a keyboard instead of a mouse. Chromevox is a built-in screen reader that can read screen text aloud and can quickly output audio subtitles in Braille when connecting a Chromebook to a Braille monitor. Chrome also now has a more natural sound for text-to-speech.