2024 Diversity Annual Report

One in five children in the U.S. has a learning and thinking difference like dyslexia and ADHD. Working with Products for All, the Chrome team developed Reading Mode, a feature that helps improve the accessibility of a given webpage, reformatting the body text of a page according to the user's font and spacing preferences.

The feature reduces potentially distracting elements on screen, such as images or videos, to encourage focus on a page’s primary content. This was yet another example of how we work to develop powerful innovations that are deeply rooted in user experience.

Reading Mode lets users create a customized reading experience. It makes reading more accessible for millions of kids with dyslexia and other learning differences. And it gives parents and educators a powerful tool to support struggling readers.

Breast cancer is the most common form of cancer globally, and early detection can lead to better patient outcomes. While screening is critical, a shortage of specialists around the world means that screening systems are often overburdened, leading to long, anxiety-filled wait times for people awaiting results.

Together with our partners, we pioneered life-affirming – and potentially lifesaving – innovations that are poised to drive impact for years to come. Among them is an artificial intelligence-powered system that integrates into breast cancer screening workflows to help radiologists identify breast cancer earlier and more consistently. Our published research shows that the technology decreases the prevalence of both false positives and false negatives.

But its diagnostic efficacy is only part of the story. Breast density varies by race and ethnicity, so broader training data can lead to broader effectiveness. That’s why we’re partnering with researchers around the world to build representative datasets. We convened a Public Involvement Forum – a group that informs and advises on how we design, test, and implement AI for mammography – that meaningfully reflects those racial and ethnic differences.

My cancer was caught late. I had to go through a mastectomy. That’s why I joined the Public Involvement Forum, to represent the patient’s voice. To ask questions like: How can this experience with AI compare to mine? Can this pick up cancer earlier, so it won’t have time to spread? I think that’s what this project is about, making things much better for patients.

Building on work we embarked on in 2022, we furthered the implementation of anonymous code reviews. These anonymized reviews are now listed as a best practice across internal documentation, and in some cases, are the default way reviews are performed.

We also committed to applying learnings from some of the most rigorous research in the field. The GenderMag Method helps identify and address software usability barriers that are more likely to impact one gender. By  combining self-reported gender data from tens of thousands of users with software logs data gathered over five years, we quantitatively show that GenderMag helped one product at Google correctly identify discoverability as a usability barrier more likely to affect women than men, and reduce the discoverability barrier by 2.4x.