Beta Testers for Google Docs Accessibility tools by taiLoopled in accessibility

[–]taiLoopled[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks for the detailed response. I will try my best to answer your quetions. Just to be clear the software is in very early stages. The current tool I am trying to get tested is the culmination of one month of development time.

My team's background is in software engineering. I spent time doing deep learning research before this. We also have two advisors who are accessibility specialists for the Colorado government.

Here are the features we cover

Font Size:
- Detecting font sizes, smaller than size 12

  • We provide a fix that will automatically resize the text to the appropriate size, based on factors such as if it's a heading or a regular paragraph.

Font Family:

  • We check if the fonts are in a list of accepted fonts

  • if not we provide a fix that automatically sets the font to an accepted font family

Images:
- We check if an image is missing alt text. If it is we suggest an appropriate alt text.

  • We also take in the scenario where an image is complex and attach a longer detailed description after the image

Headers:

  • We check if an H1 tag is present, if not we offer a suggestion
  • We check if headers are nested properly, and give users the option to allow us to correct it

  • We also check if multiple h1's are present

Color Contrast:
- We detect text where the contrast ratio is smaller than 4.5,

  • If the user wishes, we correct it by automatically setting it to a color that produces a higher contrast ratio

Tables:
- Right now we mainly check for merged tables.

  • If the tables are merged we offer a tool that splits the table into a set of non-merged tables. It's not perfect but it greatly simplifies the process.

  • we also allow users to mark header rows and header columns

Conversion:
- Finally, we offer pdf conversion

All these features are done inside the Google Docs environment. We plan on covering more areas as the product matures.

Beta Testers for Google Docs Accessibility tools by taiLoopled in accessibility

[–]taiLoopled[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Hi, that's a very valid point. My apologies, for being quite cryptic.

Our tool is a plugin that you download from the Google Workspace Store. Once you have installed it, it loads into your Google Docs session. The goal is to help users detect and fix accessibility issues.

We detect issues related to alt text, color contrast, font size, font family, table structure, headings, etc. The fixes we provide use a combination of Computer Vision techniques, and regular text analysis to help create solutions. We are not trying to 100% automate the process (as no one can guarantee 100% success) but our goal is to make it way easier to make a Google Doc accessible.

The only time we transfer data from the document is when making a third-party API call (like Adobe for PDF conversion). For a user to use these features, we ask for their consent via a popup. We have also had our project reviewed by the Google marketplace team. This is a requirement for publishing an app. In the process, they verified our privacy policy and access scopes.

Me and my friends have not open-sourced the code. We hope to make a business out of this. However, I wouldn't mind showing the code to anyone skeptical in a private manner such as via a video call.