Chrome Accessibility Features Most People Do Not Know Exist

Chrome has a lot of accessibility features built in, and most people never find them. They're useful well beyond disability: captions in a noisy room, reading aloud while you cook, bigger text on a tired evening.

Live Caption

Settings → Accessibility → Live Caption. Chrome adds captions to almost any audio or video playing in the browser, including podcasts and video calls, and the captions are created on your device.

Reading mode and Read aloud

Right-click a page → Open in reading mode. A side panel shows the text without ads or menus, with your choice of font, size, spacing and colors. Press play to have it read aloud, with each word highlighted as it's spoken.

Caret browsing

Press F7 to move through a page with a text cursor, as in a document. Select text with Shift and the arrow keys, without a mouse.

Focus highlighting

Settings → Accessibility → Show a quick highlight on the focused object. When you move through a page with the keyboard, Chrome briefly highlights where you are, even on sites that hide their focus outline.

Minimum font size

Settings → Appearance → Customize fonts → Minimum font size. Chrome won't show text smaller than this, on any site. See resizing text without zoom.

Per-site zoom

Ctrl and + zooms one site, and Chrome remembers it. Set a default zoom for all sites in Settings → Appearance → Page zoom.

Image descriptions and PDFs for screen readers

With a screen reader running, Chrome can ask Google to describe images that have no alt text, and recognize text in scanned PDFs so it can be read out. Look for these options in Settings → Accessibility, or in the right-click menu.

Tab search and keyboard shortcuts

Ctrl + Shift + A searches all your open tabs. F6 moves between the address bar, bookmarks and page. See browsing with only a keyboard.

System settings Chrome follows

• Dark mode: set Chrome to follow your device in Settings → Appearance → Mode.
• Contrast themes on Windows change colors on websites too. See high contrast mode explained.
• Reduced motion: many sites cut animations when you turn on reduced motion in your system settings.

When you need more

Extensions fill the gaps, such as ADHD Reading Focus, which shows one paragraph at a time in larger text. See accessibility extensions for Chrome.