Google's new Accessibility Discovery Centre in London
Last week, Google launched its new Accessibility Discovery Centre (ADC) at its central London office located in the Kings Cross district of the U.K. capital.
In doing so, the tech giant announced its intentions to enhance its understanding and commitment to accessibility innovation across its multiple product lines to new and exciting levels.
The dedicated R&D center, the first of its kind for Google outside of the U.S., will assist its engineers, researchers and wider product teams to address technology access barriers faced by individuals with a wide range of disabilities.
The space is split between an area focusing on research and innovation where cameras and other monitoring devices can observe users with disabilities using technology to accomplish daily tasks and a separate codesign and workshop space to facilitate broader discussions on how to build cutting-edge accessible technology.
In opening its London Accessibility Discovery Centre, Google aspires to a new level of maturity and sophistication when it comes to building accessible products.
Commonly, accessibility in the tech industry is viewed as an extra layer bolted onto software or hardware to make products usable by the widest possible range of people, including individuals with physical or sensory impairments.
Ideally, accessibility features are baked in from the very start of the design process.
Although, unfortunately, all too often, accessibility considerations become an afterthought in product design and developers then attempt to retrofit features late in the day — leading to poor functionality at the outset and ultimately higher development costs.
A deeper understanding
Rather than viewing accessibility as a siloed set of considerations on a per- product basis, Google is instead committing itself to a far broader and more in-depth process of continuous knowledge enrichment and learning.
One important way that Google has set about achieving this goal is by advancing its understanding of the assistive technology space in its entirety, as opposed to simply maintaining a narrow focus on its own product lines.
The discovery center was built in consultation with disability advocacy organizations and not-for-profits including the Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB), Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID), the Manchester-based assistive technology charity Everyone Can and Google’s internal Disability Alliance employee resource group.
The discovery center’s interactive zones are packed to the rafters with all manner of third-party assistive technology software and devices, from vibrating alarm clocks that go under the pillow of sleepers with hearing loss and tactile watches for the blind, to different types of switches to help those with motor impairments navigate menus and screens.
Many operational insights have been gained through exploring accessible gaming technology and the discovery center has three dedicated gaming stations running mainstream titles using assistive hardware.
This includes Tobi Dynavox eye trackers, the Xbox adaptive controller, head switches and a chin joystick.
This emphasis on gaming as an entry point for better understanding assistive technology speaks to Google’s wider mission of supporting, not only its staff (internally referred to as Googlers) with disabilities to explore what’s out there, but to encourage visits to the space and dialogue with schools, universities and businesses too.
Playing FIFA 2022 via chin controller at Google's Accessibility Discovery Centre in London
Speaking on the center’s launch last week, Christopher Patnoe Google’s EMEA Lead for Accessibility and Disability Inclusion said, “‘When people have equitable access to information and opportunity, everyone wins – but we know people’s needs are constantly changing, throughout their lives or even their day.
“Our new Accessibility Discovery Centre creates a dedicated space to learn from and partner with the accessibility and disability communities to keep improving and building helpful products together.”
Going further
Additional announcements made at the launch event included the unveiling of Project Relate – an Android app in beta designed to assist individuals with non-standard speech to communicate more easily.
The app can be trained in a relatively short time to understand a user’s specific speech patterns to convert their words into text, a clear synthetic voice or a voice assistant command.
Further commitments to provide over one million pounds worth of grants in the areas of digital skills certification for young disabled job seekers, digital safety and online education courses for vulnerable individuals with learning disabilities and supporting the European Disability Forum to undertake research into employment barriers for people with disabilities across the continent were also announced.
Google’s humility in acknowledging accessibility to be a continuous journey and not a final destination is welcome news for any assistive technology enthusiast and, more importantly, those who use it to manage everyday tasks that non-disabled people take for granted.
When it comes to innovation in the space, while smaller third-party specialist assistive technology developers do a crucial job in terms of highlighting needs and launching entry-level solutions – the complexity of creating highly transformative technologies for people with disabilities is often well beyond their typical R&D budgets.
Often, even if such solutions are brought to market, the costs are often out of reach for the majority of users.
Mainstreaming, leveraging the smartphone ecosystem and coming up with groundbreaking innovation are commonly the purview of Big Tech, so it’s encouraging to know that Google’s thirst for knowledge and better solutions remains unquenched.
