Blind and otherwise visually impaired people now have an easier time using Google+ Hangouts group video chats, thanks to a Chrome extension hacked together by a software engineer called Mohamed Mansour.
The extension, which is aptly called Accessible Hangouts, uses text-to-speech to tell blind people when they are entering and exiting their Hangouts, and even reads all the text chat messages of a Hangout out loud. Take a peek at Mansour’s demo below:
Mansuour wrote in a Google+ post Wednesday night that he hacked the extension together in a few hours after meeting a blind war veteran in a Google+ Hangout:
I was writing on the chat on the left, and it was really difficult for him to read the text. I am really into accessibility, and I worked on it a lot in Chromium in the past, and I really wanted to help him. So I told Tim, ‘what if the chat spoke to you?’ Tim said, ‘that would be awesome’. When I saw the big smile on his face, I had to do it!
The Accessible Hangouts extension is an open source project, and Mansour’s hope is that Google will eventually integrate it natively into Hangouts. The chances for such a step are actually pretty good: Google has spent a lot of time making Hangouts more accessible and has in the past worked on ways to optimize the group video chat for mute and deaf people.

{"source":"https:\/\/gigaom.com\/2012\/03\/08\/google-hangouts-accessible-blind\/wijax\/49e8740702c6da9341d50357217fb629","varname":"wijax_618744cc8ea428f7e00c0ce154eadde9","title_element":"header","title_class":"widget-title","title_before":"%3Cheader%20class%3D%22widget-title%22%3E","title_after":"%3C%2Fheader%3E"}