You can enable synthesized speech feedback, high contrast mode, and screen magnifier for your Chrome device, if you have visual impairments.
Enable accessibility options
- If you haven’t already, sign in to your Chrome device. You can change your accessibility settings when you turn on your Chrome device for the first time by clicking on the Accessibility area in the lower left corner as you review the Chrome OS Terms and Conditions.
- Click the status area in the lower-right corner, where your account picture appears.
- Select Settings.
- Click Show advanced settings at the bottom of the page.
- In the "Accessibility" section, select any of the following checkboxes:
- Enable spoken feedback
- Enable high contrast mode
- Enable screen magnifier
After you've enabled Accessibility features, you'll be able to adjust them from the status area. Then you can press Ctrl + Alt + Brightness up or Brightness down (or use Ctrl + Alt + two fingers scrolling up or down on the trackpad) to magnify the screen. You can also press Ctrl+Alt+Z to enable or disable spoken feedback.
How spoken feedback works
- On the sign-in screen, the user name field and password prompts are spoken. Your password is not echoed when you enter it for security reasons.
- Once you're signed in, the Chrome OS screenreader, ChromeVox, is activated. With ChromeVox active, you get spoken feedback for all user actions (e.g. browsing menus, opening webpages).
- ChromeVox provides a set of keyboard commands you can use to navigate Chrome menus and webpages. You can navigate web content in a variety of ways. For example, pressing the arrow keys while holding down the Shift and Search keys moves through the elements on the current page and speaks them intelligently as they are traversed. If you're using an external keyboard (on a Chromebook or Chromebox), the shortcut keys are Shift and Windows key.
Next steps
- See information on setting up your Chrome device for the first time.
- If you've already set up your Chrome device, see the ChromeVox User Guide for more information on using ChromeVox.
- See a full list of available Chrome keyboard shortcuts.
- Learn more about Google's accessibility efforts
