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In celebration of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), Google is making some big changes to the PlayStore to make the place more accessible to people with disabilities. An application can be compatible with multiple chips at the same time, depending on the accessibility features it provides.
The Play Store will have an extra tab to make some of its 3.4 million apps accessible to people with disabilities. This label will come in the form of an accessibility (a11y) label, which will appear as a chip in the “About this app” section of the app.
These tags also categorize apps according to their accessibility features. They have seven categories. Screen Reader Friendly, Visually Assisted, Auditory Assisted, Learning Disabled, Motor Assisted, and Accessible Communication.
Google says the tag “marks a sample of an app” for now, so not everything on the Play Store will have these chips. Still, the company promises to bring this new tab to more apps in the future. At that point, this will allow people with disabilities to easily identify apps that cater to their needs.
But beyond that, Google will help regular people who like to use and have some accessibility features in the apps they’re using. More importantly, this will free Play Store users from having to fully install an app in order to verify that it actually has the accessibility features they want.
Google is just one of the big tech companies to start implementing new accessibility features in its products and products to celebrate GAAD. Netflix recently announced that it is expanding the availability of audio descriptions and subtitles for its show and movie offerings.
Microsoft got in on the action too, offering some new products for people with disabilities and taking steps to make technology more accessible to them. This includes a line of adaptive accessories expected to arrive in the fall of 2022, as well as a neurodiversity career connector website for job seekers with neurological disorders.
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