Google's New Accessibility Features to Drive User Momentum
Alphabet’s GOOGL division Google is making every effort to bolster accessibility features in a bid to strengthen presence among people with cognitive and physical disabilities.
This is evident from the latest move of unveiling Action Blocks app for the Android users on the Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
Notably, the launch of Action Blocks app remains noteworthy with regard to the company’s easy accessibility drive. The app, which was at testing stage last year, is now available on Play Store for free.
It allows users to create shortcuts to various apps on the home screen of the smartphone, thus making those apps easily accessible.
Google strives to make functions like listening to music, making a phone call and launching a video call among others seamless for people with autism, Down’s Syndrome and elderly users.
We believe the latest move is expected to increase adoption of Android among people with cognitive disorders.
Consequently, this will aid the dominant position of Google in the global mobile operating system market, which contributes significantly to the performance of Alphabet’s Google segment. Moreover, solid performance of this segment has been instilling investor confidence in the stock.
Coming to the price performance, Alphabet has returned 24.2% over a year, outperforming the industry’s rally of 7%.
Other Easy Accessibility Options
Apart from Action Blocks, Google has rolled out some other accessibility features on the same day.
The company has made advancements in its Live Transcribe feature in its efforts to improve Android’s voice and sound features.
The updated Live Transcribe feature is equipped to create vibrations in the smartphone when user’s name is called out by someone. Further, Google has added Albanian, Burmese, Estonian, Macedonian, Mongolian, Punjabi, and Uzbek languages support to the feature.
The company strives to deliver enhanced user experience to people who have difficulty in hearing.
Additionally, the search giant has introduced Bluetooth functionality in its sound amplifier feature, which will transmit the audio to the Bluetooth backed hearing aids by placing the smartphone of a user who is suffering from hearing difficulties.
Further, the company introduced Google Maps’ wheelchair accessibility feature, which will deliver enhanced mapping experience to the physically challenged people using wheelchairs.
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Other Tech Companies in Fray
Along with Google, tech companies like Microsoft MSFT, Apple AAPL and Amazon AMZN are also making advancements in their accessibility features.
With regard to Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Microsoft recently made improvements in its real-time speech-to-text transcription, visual recognition technology and predictive text function.
In a bid to help the blind people or ones with low vision, the company has made advances to its Microsoft Soundscape.
Meanwhile, Apple offers several new features across its sites and services to allow access to technology for people with disabilities.
Amazon’s Alexa allows people with disabilities to access and control various aspects of their daily lives with the voice command.
Features like Tap to Alexa and Closed Captioning on Alexa help the company in delivering better user experience to people who have difficulty in speaking and hearing, respectively.
Further, Alexa features like Screen Magnifier, Colour Inversion and Colour Correction allow people with vision problems to enjoy virtual assistant experience seamlessly.
Nevertheless, the latest efforts of Google in the accessibility drive are likely to aid its competitive position against the abovementioned companies.
Currently, Alphabet carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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