This is the transcript of 'Accessibility in Google Education' video
Chris Betcher:
Hi, it's Chris Betcher here, from the Google for Education team. I'm taking you through today to some of the settings and options you have inside Google Workspace for Education, and Chromebooks, if you happen to be using Chromebooks, on how you can make the stuff you're doing in your classroom more accessible to students.
And by accessible, what I really mean is just making it available to them in the ways that they need to consume it. So, for example, some students have special needs in terms of the way they need to see things or hear things or interact with things. And so I wanna take you through some of those options. And this first session is about helping students see things more easily.
So let's look at some of the options that are available.
All right, so I'm in a Google Doc here, and you can see I've just got some notes I've been taking here. Well, one of the first things you can do in a Google Doc, let me move myself around there, is simply to make it bigger, just to see it bigger. And that in itself is a huge help for some students. They just wanna be able to see more, or, you know, have bigger fonts. Well, if you're inside a Google Doc, that's pretty easy. You've got this option here to change the view or the zoom level. So right now this is set to 100%, but I could go bigger if I want to, say, 150%, You can make it smaller if you want. Some people might wanna see more of the text because their eyesight is really good and they can read that little print. I can't, but some people might. So you can go either way if you want. That's fine. And of course, if you just choose this Fit option here, it actually makes fit for the biggest size it can fit on the screen that you've got. So that's one option you can use for making text bigger or smaller.
Now, what happens if you're not inside, say, Google Docs? What if you're over on the internet? So here is, for example, an article from the ABC News, and see it's about the Olympics which are finishing today. What if this is too small for you, how can you make the text bigger? If you just wanna make the content inside the web browser bigger, simply hold the Ctrl key and the Plus button on your keyboard. So let me show you what that looks like. If I go Ctrl and Plus, the text gets a little bit bigger. Ctrl and Plus again gets a little bit bigger. Again, gets a little bit bigger, and so on, and so on. And you can continue making that fairly large. You can go the other way too, of course. If it's Ctrl + Plus to get bigger, you probably guessed it's Ctrl + Minus to get smaller. And I can keep going, and I can keep going smaller, and smaller, and smaller. And I can make that lots, and lots.
Sometimes it's helpful to see the context on the screen, so you're not just seeing this narrow little bit. You've got the choice, and that's what accessibility is really all about. is giving users choices so they can interact with their computers and their content in ways that make sense for them. They don't have to have a special need for that, they can just prefer it that way. To go back to normal, it's Ctrl + 0. So Ctrl + Plus makes it bigger, Ctrl + Minus makes it smaller, and Ctrl + 0 brings it back to normal or standard, 100%. So that's one way you can do it if needing to enlarge or shrink things is what you need. There are tools in there to do that, okay?
Now, what if you wanted to zoom in specifically on a part of the screen? Well, let me just move me out of the way here. Now, this is a Chromebook feature. So, what I've just showed you a moment ago works with inside the Chrome browser, and you can be doing that on any computer, Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome, doesn't matter. The thing I'm about to show you is specifically for Chromebooks.
On a Chromebook, down here in the bottom corner here, you've got this option here for accessibility. Now, if you don't see that accessibility option, what you can do, let me just open up this for a second. This is the settings for my Chromebook. And if I go all the way to the bottom and open the Advanced section, and scroll all the way to the bottom, you see there's a section in here called Accessibility. And this little switch here, that little button, actually turns on or off the button in the main menu. It's a good idea to turn it on. I would recommend you come into the settings and flip that switch, so the accessibility button is always showing. That way, when you want accessibility settings, let me close this, you don't need to go digging around in the settings, they're all just right air for you.
Now, in terms of, again, helping people make things easier to see, there's also what's called the Full screen magnifier, the Docked magnifier, and you might have noticed my mouse cursor here has this red ring around that. Every time I keep it still, that goes away, but every time I move it, that red ring comes back. I find that really useful when I'm working on my computer, and I have another screen attached to it here that's quite a big screen. Sometimes I lose the mouse and I wiggle it around and can't find it, so having the little red ring around it really helps. But doesn't just help me. You imagine, you are showing something to students, you are demonstrating something in your classroom, up on the big board in your classroom, it's often very helpful if the students can see where that mouse is moving. So when your Full screen magnifier is enabled, what you do is hold down the Ctrl + Alt key, and then scroll slightly. Now, I'm on a laptop computer here so I can scroll with my two fingers on the track pad. If you had a mouse attached to your computer, you could scroll with a mouse. But Ctrl + Alt, and you can see I now scroll slightly, and it zooms in and out. So if I wanted to alert my students to say, you know, one of these pieces of text over here, I could simply scroll in like that while I'm holding Ctrl and Alt. And it works on the entire screen, so if I wanted to show you these buttons up here, for example, I could scroll in on those buttons, like so, and scroll out again. So, really helpful to be able to zoom in and zoom out.
But as you probably saw there, sometimes it can be a bit disorienting as well. When it zooms in and out like that, sometimes you kind of, "Where am I? I don't know what's going on. This has suddenly got big, but I don't know where I am." So that's why I actually really like the Docked magnifier. So the Docked magnifier works like this. Let me go into the settings again and show you Accessibility, this Docked magnifier right here. If I turn that on, what it does is it splits my screen for me. Two thirds is regular, 100% normal size, and the top third is enlarged. And you can actually change how enlarged it is, right? But what it means now is if I move my mouse around in the lower part of the screen, the top part of the screen changes with a magnified view. And again, like I said, I can change the level of magnification in that view, it's in the settings.
Now, how is that useful? Well, you know, if I'm working on a document and my eyes aren't the best, or I just, the font is too small, or whatever reason that I want that text to be bigger so I can read it more easily, I can turn on this Docked magnifier. I can still have the regular part of the screen down the bottom, but I can see the enlarged view up the top. And that's really helpful. And of course, if you are a teacher in a classroom, maybe demonstrating something to your students on your computer, on the board in the classroom, then, you know, having that large section at the top of the screen for the students down the back of the room to be able to see, that's also pretty helpful for them as well.
Now, what if, like, I would prefer to see not sort of black on white, but I prefer to see white on black? Well, there's a couple of options you've got. The sort of the blunt instrument here is a thing called High-contrast mode. When you turn High-contrast mode, it literally reverses all the colours. So black becomes white, white becomes black. But also like yellow becomes, let's have a look, yellow becomes purple, reds become, whatever red, they just literally reverses everything. That works well for some students. That is easier for them to see, especially if they're low vision students, that can be really helpful. But there's also another thing that we're starting to build into a lot of our tools now called dark mode. And you're seeing it more and more. I'll give you an example here. This is Google Keep. It's a little lightweight note-taking app. It's part of Google Workspace for Education. It is by default, a white background with black text and coloured notes, and things sitting on top of that white background. But up here in the Settings, you've got the option now to enable a dark theme. When I turn that on, it actually doesn't reverse everything. You can see my video down the bottom, there is still sort of the normal colours, but it reverses the colours of the other things on the screen. And again, that's super useful for a lot of students who need that sort of contrasting mode. And I think you're gonna find that that dark mode is going to appear in more and more tools, because that's quite a popular thing. A lot of people really like it. If you don't like it, that's okay, you can always disable the dark theme, go back to that one, and that's fine.
And that's the thing about accessibility. It's about giving users choice. You should be able to make this thing work any way that works for you.
So let's go back to the Accessibility settings here. Just scroll down a little bit and you'll see Additional settings. I can have a large mouse cursor so I can turn that on. You can see now my mouse cursor is extra large. That could be helpful. I can turn that off on, or off. In terms of highlighting areas of the screen, that's highlighting the mouse cursor. That's that red circle I mentioned before. But you can also turn on things like highlighting the text caret. That means highlighting where you're about to type. So when you're about to type something, let's just turn that on and I'll show you. If I go up here and type into this search box, for example, there you go. So it's flashing the text cursor where I'm typing, so you actually see where you're typing.
So those are the some of the features inside Google Workspace for Education and inside Chromebooks that are probably pretty helpful for users that need a little bit of help with the way they see things on their computer screens.
End of transcript.
