ID :
188477
Tue, 06/14/2011 - 12:59
Auther :
Shortlink :
https://oananews.org//node/188477
The shortlink copeid
Google works to give seniors, disabled people wider Web access
By Lee Youkyung
SEOUL, June 14 (Yonhap) -- Google Inc. is striving to make the Internet more accessible to senior citizens and disabled people through new technology developed in an effort to help change their lives, a company engineer said Tuesday.
In the past three years, Google has launched several services to help people with poor vision or total hearing loss have equal access to the Web. The services include automatically converting audio data in a YouTube video into captions and using voice-command functions on a touch-based smartphone.
Even though those technologies are far from being flawless at this stage and cover only a fraction of information available online, they represent a massive improvement from the past and are in line with Google's guiding principles, said the engineer, T.V. Raman.
"Because the cup (that contains online information) is getting bigger and bigger, the impact it has had on people with disabilities is absolutely enormous," Raman, a visually impaired computer scientist at Google, told reporters in Seoul at a press meeting. "The Web is the platform where all information lives."
Raman was in Seoul to discuss ways to enhance the Web accessibility on smartphones made by Android partners, such as Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc.
Raman said that as a student, he constantly had to convert printed books into audio formats that he could use.
While working as part of Google's team that develops new services, such as Voice Search or text-to-speech conversion, he has discovered that those technologies also benefit a wider population.
"A lot of accessibility work we do is about taking information in one format and turning it into another," he said. "As we do this, the core thing that Google does, which is search, gets better."
The auto caption conversion service on YouTube videos could be useful for people watching videos in a noisy setting. In the future, taking the audio data of one language and converting the information into a printed text in another language will also become smooth, he said.
The cost has become significantly lower for people with special needs to gain the tools that aid their access to the Web, Raman said. Google is offering its services with free downloads or by having them pre-loaded onto its Chrome and Android operating systems.
With the goal of "making information accessible to everyone," including senior citizens and people with special needs, Google is prioritizing educational materials, such as books, to become accessible online, he added.
ylee@yna.co.kr
SEOUL, June 14 (Yonhap) -- Google Inc. is striving to make the Internet more accessible to senior citizens and disabled people through new technology developed in an effort to help change their lives, a company engineer said Tuesday.
In the past three years, Google has launched several services to help people with poor vision or total hearing loss have equal access to the Web. The services include automatically converting audio data in a YouTube video into captions and using voice-command functions on a touch-based smartphone.
Even though those technologies are far from being flawless at this stage and cover only a fraction of information available online, they represent a massive improvement from the past and are in line with Google's guiding principles, said the engineer, T.V. Raman.
"Because the cup (that contains online information) is getting bigger and bigger, the impact it has had on people with disabilities is absolutely enormous," Raman, a visually impaired computer scientist at Google, told reporters in Seoul at a press meeting. "The Web is the platform where all information lives."
Raman was in Seoul to discuss ways to enhance the Web accessibility on smartphones made by Android partners, such as Samsung Electronics Co. and LG Electronics Inc.
Raman said that as a student, he constantly had to convert printed books into audio formats that he could use.
While working as part of Google's team that develops new services, such as Voice Search or text-to-speech conversion, he has discovered that those technologies also benefit a wider population.
"A lot of accessibility work we do is about taking information in one format and turning it into another," he said. "As we do this, the core thing that Google does, which is search, gets better."
The auto caption conversion service on YouTube videos could be useful for people watching videos in a noisy setting. In the future, taking the audio data of one language and converting the information into a printed text in another language will also become smooth, he said.
The cost has become significantly lower for people with special needs to gain the tools that aid their access to the Web, Raman said. Google is offering its services with free downloads or by having them pre-loaded onto its Chrome and Android operating systems.
With the goal of "making information accessible to everyone," including senior citizens and people with special needs, Google is prioritizing educational materials, such as books, to become accessible online, he added.
ylee@yna.co.kr
