To ensure that our offices meet the needs of all, Googlers with disabilities are taking a leading role in efforts to reimagine and rebuild Google’s workspaces. In Korea, for example, members of the Disability Alliance Employee Resource Group partnered with the Real Estate & Workplace Services team to make our Gangnam office more accessible. Working closely together, they started with improvements to our existing office space, from posting meeting room signs in braille to installing drop-down thresholds for doors. Then they co-designed a new floor based on universal design principles, with features like wider spaces for mobility and easy-to-reach shelves, sinks, and other elevated surfaces. Take a video tour of the new and improved Gangnam office here.

We’re committed to making sure Googlers with disabilities can thrive at Google and beyond. Here are some recent efforts:

• To increase representation of people with disabilities in technology, we launched gReach in Asia. gReach is a paid upskilling programme for students and industry professionals with disabilities, offering participants on-the-job training and work experience within Google teams.

• Our talent engagement team in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa hosted its first Disability Conference for nearly 2,000 students, new graduates, and industry professionals with disabilities. The event created a space for people with disabilities and allies to connect and engage with each other and Google.

• In Brazil, we tripled the representation of Googlers with disabilities in 2022, and launched real-time, live captioning (generated by real people), live audio-descriptors, and sign language interpreters for all office-wide meetings.

More than 250 million people around the world experience difficulty making their words understood due to non-standard speech. That’s why we designed Project Relate, an Android app offering personalised speech recognition to help people with non-standard speech communicate more easily in face-to-face conversations. Developed through years of research and based on speech samples contributed by more than 1,000 individuals, the app is now available in beta in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, and the United States.

We’re excited about the power that AI has to help people with disabilities more easily communicate, access information, and achieve their unique goals. Here are some of our latest AI-driven innovations designed in collaboration with the blind and low-vision community:

• Lookout uses AI to help people explore the world and accomplish everyday tasks, like sorting mail and putting away groceries. Now this Android feature is even more powerful with the addition of Image Q&A, which generates image descriptions and answers any follow-up questions you ask using your voice or typing. The app recently became available in Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, bringing the total number of supported languages to 34.

• Based on our internal analysis, there are more than 360 billion PDFs online that are inaccessible for people who rely on screen readers. With the help of AI, we're creating a built-in Chrome browser feature that extracts text from PDFs, enabling blind and low-vision readers to access these documents using screen readers.

• We recently added new functionality and features to our TalkBack screen reader for Android and WearOS, which people in the blind and low-vision community can use to read, write, navigate apps, and more.

We’re working to improve representation of people with disabilities by including more members of the disability community in datasets and reference sources. For AI, that means specifically training our image technology on thousands of photos of people from historically marginalised backgrounds, including individuals with chronic conditions and disabilities, as well as people across the gender spectrum and models with darker skin tones. More representative data sets means better experiences for everyone on products like Google Photos, Google Pixel, and Pixel cameras.

At the same time, we’re supporting inclusion and innovation in journalism to ensure that newsrooms are producing the most inclusive media possible, including appropriate representation of people with disabilities. For example, Quote This Woman+, a winner of the third Middle East, Turkey, and Africa Innovation Challenge, works to diversify sources used by newsrooms and journalists in South Africa by elevating underrepresented experts, including people with disabilities.

At the end of 2022 we launched the Accessibility Discovery Centre in London. It’s a space where our engineers, researchers, product teams, and partners can explore and build new kinds of accessible technologies, and it’s our first centre of its kind outside the U.S. Built in consultation with Google’s Disability Alliance employee resource group and local partners like the U.K.’s Royal National Institute of Blind People and Royal National Institute for Deaf People, the centre builds on our years of investment and innovation in helpful and accessible technology.

We’re taking what we learn and applying it in our events and partnerships, with the goal of inspiring change across the creative industry. As the first official accessibility partner of Cannes Lions, we’re working with Cannes to make sure the festival is built with people with disabilities in mind. This includes providing sign language interpreters and using Live Transcribe for real-time captioning. We also ensure that the Google Beach, our home base at Cannes, is wheelchair-accessible and provides CART captioning, Live Transcribe for real-time captioning, and ASL interpreters.