Google has rolled out a new accessibility feature to the Canary Channel of Chrome in a bid to make screen readers more useful where images are concerned, according to a social media post from the company. The feature allows images that haven’t been marked with a description or other attributes such as ‘alt text’ to be described to users anyway.
Users effectively enable the new feature by giving the browser permission to send images that are being read by the screen reader to Google for analysis. Once the image analysis is complete, the description is sent back to the user’s screen reader to be read out in line with other text in exactly the same way images would normally be included.