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2018 Summer Convention Special #Sponsored: New Accessibility Features Coming To G Suite


You might not recognize the name G suite but you might be surprised to know that you may be using one of its products regularly. That s because G Suite is more than Slides, Sheets and Google Docs. Products like Hangouts, Google Calendar and Gmail are also a part of the many collaboration tools found within this powerful collection of useful apps.

Roger Benz, Accessibility Manager for G-Suite, gives J.J. an overview of some new accessibility features recently added to G Suite. Our conversation begins with talk about the enhancements made to Braille support for Screen Reader users for Google Docs and Sheets. We then turn to the new magnification improvements for tracking focus within Google Slides, Docs and Sheets. Also covered is a brief discussion about new changes made to Google Calendar and how you can add contacts to Google Meet.

Check out the Google Accessibility blog to learn more about what changes are happening at Google.
Follow Google Access on Twitter
Or, visit the Google Access site
] to find helpful information and resources about various Google products.

Our 2018 summer convention coverage is sponsored by Google.

This week we re teaming up with our friends on the Google Accessibility team to talk about accessibility features within products like Android, Chrome OS, G Suite, Google Home, Assistant and more! Be sure to listen to our podcast series where we get the inside scoop, including the upcoming launch of Chat support and a 24 hour response time for the Disability Support team on July 9th.

The Google Accessibility team is also inviting everyone to participate in user research studies, where you can help shape the future of accessible products and features -- and get rewarded for it. Select here to sign up to participate and learn more at google.com/accessibility.

Transcript

We strive to provide an accurate transcription, though errors may occur.

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Transcribed by Grecia Ramirez

This convention special podcast is sponsored by Google.
Our friends at Google are working hard to create great technology products for everyone. They’re inviting you to participate in Google user research studies, where you can help shape the future of accessible products and features and get rewarded for it. Check out our tweet for the sign-up link, at blind bargains, or head to google.com slash user research.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh
J.J. MEDDAUGH: 2018 summer convention coverage, and thank you so much to Google for sponsoring the convention series, telling us about some of the great Google products that are available and some of the presentations you’re doing at convention. We have Roger Benz here. He is accessibility program manager for G-Suite for Google, and here to tell us about some of the latest with that. Roger, welcome to the podcast.
ROGER BENZ: Thank you for hosting me.
JM: So why don’t we go a little bit high-level at first and actually talk about – some people might not realize what exactly G-Suite includes.
RB: G-Suite is our set of productivity and collaboration tools, which includes the products like Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Hangout Meet, Hangout Chat, and there’s a few other things that also fall into the G-Suite suite of tools.
JM: Wow. That’s quite a few. It certainly has expanded over time. And then, of course, you can use this on a variety of platforms; correct?
RB: Correct. We have it available on, you know, web browser that you can use on, say, Chromebooks, on Windows, Macs, use, you know, the different browsers within those, and also the different screen readers. For example, on Chromebook, you’d be using the ChromeVox screen reader; on Mac, you’d be using VoiceOver; and on Windows, you can use NVDA or JAWS, whichever one you want.
JM: Uh-huh.
RB: We also have G-Suite available as applications on Android, where you would be using TalkBack, as well as other assistive technology apps to use like VoiceAccess. And also, we support the G-Suite applications on iOS.
JM: That’s great. Of course, going across platforms too. Most of the commands, the interface, are going to be the same, no matter which platform you choose to use; correct?
RB: Correct. You know, I mean, there’s some differences, you know, based on the type of, say, technology you’re using, but on, say, the computer side, you know, since we’re running inside of our browser, the shortcuts are all the same within our applications. You know, the shortcuts are different based on the screen reader, they have their own differences. And on, you know, the Android and iOS, you know, we do try to support the same configuration gestures that you would use in general for our applications. So it’s – we try to tailor also to the platform convention that’s used.
JM: Great. And now, of course, you’re here at the convention, the ACB in St. Louis, and you’re doing presentations at both conventions, you and the Google team and some new things that you’re sharing with G-Suite. Why don’t you tell us about some of those.
RB: So one of the things we want to talk about that’s exciting is that we recently supported braille in Google Sheets. And with that, you do need to make sure you get the latest version of NVDA and JAWS and, you know, like for NVDA, you need to be 2018.2, and for JAWS, it needs to be 2018 with the latest patches applied to it.
JM: Uh-huh.
RB: We also announced app support for magnification, specifically where we do cursor tracking. And at this time, that’s available only on Chrome OS and Mac. We are working on window’s support, and we hope to have some announcements for that in the future, but we don’t have any templates at this time. In addition, a couple of the applications I’m going to be highlighting at this convention is we’ve done – earlier this year, you know, we announced and released a major update to Calendar, where it’s got a whole new UI to it. You know, it’s a new, modern-looking feel to it. But also, for the screen reader users, we’ve improved accessibility to it so that now, instead of just, say, the Schedule view, you can also use the Day view, the Week view, the Month view. We’ve also surfaced more information to be readily available to you, for example, if you’ve got a calendar that has multiple calendars on it, you can actually know, is this, say, for example, an event from JJ’s calendar or Roger’s calendar or anybody else’s. And then also, some information like the RSVP. So we’ve made getting to and accessing information much easier and quicker for the user.
JM: So why don’t we deep-dive into some of these a little bit more. You talked about the calendar. You’ve added a whole bunch of new keyboard shortcuts and interactivity in the way that you can move around, or how does some of that work?
RB: So the shortcuts on calendar are still very similar to what we had before. But for example, if you have, say, virtual cursor turned off or you’re in focus mode, if you press the letter, C, you can start to create the new event. And then, if you, say, want to move around to different days, you can type the letter, G, and that will prompt you to go-to a particular date. And then, if you’ve ever navigated to a different area, you can also press the letter, T, to return back to today. You can also, you know, go in and some other shortcuts. N and P is the way you can go to the next or the previous, you know, period based on your current view. For example, if you’re in the Day view, it’ll go to the next day; if you’re in a Month view, it’ll take you to the next month.
JM: And these are self-voicing; right? So the idea being you don’t have to try to switch as much between Focus mode, Browse mode, whatever you call it on your screen reader.
RB: So in Calendar, you can use whichever mode that you want, so you can use it, you know, we’ve designed it to work in both ways. So it is kind of like what you say, self-vocalizing if you’re using the Focus mode, but if you do want to go ahead and use the Browse mode, you can also navigate through it quite efficiently using the Browse mode or with JAWS, that’s the virtual cursor on. And a couple of other things that we did add with the new Calendar is we added some headings for, you know, the beginning of the day, so it’s much easier to navigate around within the Calendar.
JM: And of course, a lot more navigation options like he mentioned. And the different views. So to a blind person, what would be the advantage of, say, using Day view, Week view, versus the Agenda view that many people might be used to using?
RB: That’s a good question. And, you know, it’s all, you know, up to, you know, the individual for what method they want to use it. The Day view, one of the advantages, say, if you do have multiple calendars, they’re presented side by side, whereas in the schedule view, they’re interlinked between each other.
JM: Uh-huh.
RB: The other thing is it’s more, you know, contained to the information within the Day view. You know, the Week view gives you, you know, the advantages that you can just kind of, when you’re navigating to the next and previous, you’re jumping by a week instead of by the day. And then, the Month view, you know, again, you can jump that way, but also, you kind of get things at a glance that if you’re using your left, right, up, and down arrow keys, you can go through the different days, and then you get a subset of the events on that day. And then, if you want, you can hit enter to do – up, down, enter, to get, you know, information. So it kind of depends on the user, which techniques that they want to use to be able to navigate around.
JM: And you said it works with shared calendars as well? Collaborations? I know a lot of that’s trying to find the open meeting time or people will color-code things or things like that.
RB: Yes. You know. And there’s different ways to find, you know, the open times. You know, say, if you’re showing, you know, the calendars from multiple people, you know, the information’s interlink that way. But the other thing is if you’re going to be, say, scheduling events with somebody else, you know, if you got, you know, kind of access to their calendar, you add them to your event, and then you go down to what we call the suggestion times, and it’ll give you a list of times when, say, multiple people or everybody that’s in your event are open, and then you can just quickly choose from that because it’s a menu.
JM: Okay. Let’s transition over to braille in Sheets, which you mentioned, of course works with a couple different screen readers. Right now, JAWS and NVDA, at least on Windows; right?
RB: So the braille support works with all the different screen readers, you know, that it works on, you know, Windows, as you said with NVDA and JAWS.
JM: Uh-huh.
RB: You got to use the latest versions of that. It also works on Chrome OS with the ChromeVox screen reader, and then also, on Mac with VoiceOver. One thing I do want to mention is for the braille support in Sheets, this is also similar to the braille support that we have in Docs. So under the accessibility menu, you want to go down to the settings, and you want to enable braille support in order to have – be able to use the braille display within Sheets. I do also want to mention that this setting is also applied to both Docs and Sheets, so if you have Braille mode already enabled in Docs, it will be automatically enabled for you in Sheets. And conversely, if you turned it on in Sheets, it’ll be applied to Docs. And also, I should mention here -- is, you know, everyone in Docs, that we say Braille mode, it does – is something you can use with a – if you’re using a braille display, but also even if you’re just using text to speech from a screen reader. So it can be used in both modes.
JM: You also had mentioned new magnification features? Go into a little more detail about how that might work.
RB: So the thing with the magnification support is – the main thing that it does is when you’re, say, typing within the screen, the magnification porter will now do tracking to that position, so it’s more like cursor tracking to be able to – so that you don’t have to manually move the screen around using your mouse and stuff. It’ll automatically track the – the one thing that I do want to mention here is if you are going to be wanting to enable the magnification, you do need to go into the accessibility setting and enable magnification support within Docs, Sheets, and Slides.
JM: I see. And then once you do that, then the magnification will just – it’ll work transparently with the currently supported –
RB: Yeah.
JM: -- operation system.
RB: For whichever platform does support it.
JM: Awesome. One more thing that you were going to talk about: your presentations. I think that people may not be familiar with Google Meet.
RB: So Google Meet is our video conferencing system, which is available on the different platforms, you know, from, you know, a laptop, or also from Android and iOS. The one thing you do have to have is something with a camera and a microphone, and this is a very simple way to, you know, have, you know, video conferencing meetings. It’s also tied into Calendar, so that when you are booking your meeting, you can set up the option to have a video conferencing available right there to be able to, you know, have a video meeting with somebody. And you can add multiple people into it. It depends on whether you’re using, say, consumer accounts or the business accounts as far as the number of people you can have. And there’s different options available if you do have the commercial accounts.
JM: And the accessibility comes both for someone that’s organizing a meeting and someone who wants to participate in a meeting?
RB: Correct.
JM: And I actually was just using this pretty recently, and it’s very – it’s pretty self-voicing when you’re turning on and off the microphone and the webcam and things like that. It’s very, very intuitive to use.
RB: And it’s, you know – the way we’ve done, you know, the integration in the Calendar, you know, it’s just something there so that when you have an event in your calendar, you know, if you press enter to open up the event bubble, one of the things in there is a link that you can just go to and then quickly join into the meeting. You don’t have to remember the code that’s for the meeting. It’s just all there as a link for making it easier to use.
JM: And then, so can people join on a computer platform or a mobile platform to come on the meeting or –
RB: Correct.
JM: Awesome. So you’re doing your presentations at the conventions, of course, you have a lot of materials for people that might be newer to G-Suite, how would you suggest maybe getting started? I know you guys have a lot of documentation that’s out there. What’s, like, one of the better ways to start learning that material?
RB: So the one resource that we recommend people use is our help center articles. And we’ve got several different articles, you know, for each of our applications. And the most convenient way to find that is to go to g.co/gsuiteaccessibility, and that has a webpage that has, you know, lists all of our G-Suite products and then the help center articles associated with accessibility for those different products. And the g.co is just a URL shortener that we use within Google.
JM: And of course, there’s the accessibility support desk as well that people can contact and –
RB: Right. And then, also, if you – another, you know, resource that we want – you know, that I do want to highlight too, is, you know, like, earlier, when we were talking about the keyboard shortcuts for Calendar, the keyboard shortcuts are available within our applications. So some of our applications is a control forward slash. That’s – for example, that’s what you use with docks, sheets, and slides. And our other applications, it’s just the shift slash, which is actually the question mark, and that’s, for example, what you would use inside Gmail and Calendar. So you use those two different ones, and those are also highlighted on our help center articles as a place to leave and list all the keyboard shortcuts.
JM: And there’s a fair amount of consistency too, as far as shortcuts across applications. I’m not necessarily 100 percent, but there’s quite a bit of similar shortcuts when you’re going across from one to the other.
RB: Correct. Yup. We are trying to, you know, give the user something – some consistency so that there’s commonality for using our products. Some other things you can do for support is we have an email support, and then links. We’re looking at also launching some chat support, but for the email support, you can send an email to disability-support@google.com. And there’s – our support agents will get your request and reply to that. And that support line, for that connection we use for any of the products within Google. That’s not limited to G-Suite itself.
Another resource I do want to mention too is if you’re, you know, say, you don’t remember the URL that I gave you earlier, you can also go to google.com/accessibility, and in there, you’re going to find information about what we’re doing in Google on accessibility in general, but also all of our products have links in there and information on them. So if you want to find out information on say, Android or Chrome or Assistant or some of our other applications, that’s a great resource to use as well.
JM: So if people want to contact you – I know, of course, you can do the feedback as far as – but if they have, say, have feedback on the G-Suite apps, some other things like that, what’s the best way to submit feedback?
RB: There’s a couple ways you can do that – is you can send, you know, the feedback through the disability, dash, support. Or also, on the google.com/accessibility, we have a form on there that you can go on there and provide feedback and leave your questions to Google.
JM: Thank you so much, Roger. There’s more Google podcasts coming throughout convention, so stay tuned for those. And thanks so much again to Google for supporting the convention coverage here in 2018.
RB: You’re welcome, JJ. It was great talking to you, and I hope everybody is having a great summer, and they find this information useful
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Copyright 2018


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Joe Steinkamp is no stranger to the world of technology, having been a user of video magnification and blindness related electronic devices since 1979. Joe has worked in radio, retail management and Vocational Rehabilitation for blind and low vision individuals in Texas. He has been writing about the A.T. Industry for 15 years and podcasting about it for almost a decade.


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