Google Cloud Print Ready printers now available

christosap — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 14:26:00 +0000

Imagine printing an important email from your Chrome notebook on your train ride to work, then finding the completed printout in the printer tray when you reach the office. Or printing your airline boarding pass from your smartphone to your home printer, so you can grab the printout on your way out the door. Today, we are one big step closer to this vision.

Last year, we launched Google Cloud Print, a service that enables users to print from any device, operating system, or browser to any printer without the need for drivers or a PC connection. The service can be used with any printer, but the most seamless experience is offered by Google Cloud Print Ready devices, a new generation of web-connected printers that don’t need to be attached to a computer. Today, HP has announced that all of its ePrint-enabled printers are Google Cloud Print Ready, in most cases right out of the box. With a Google Cloud Print Ready printer, you can print emails, documents and web pages from supported apps without having to hunt for drivers or printer cables.

You can already use Google Cloud Print on Chrome notebooks and in the mobile versions of Gmail and Google Docs. Many more supported apps are on the way. There are also a third-party Android app, Chrome extension and Firefox add-on to help you use Google Cloud Print in more places.

We’re also continuing to release enhancements to the Google Cloud Print service. We’ve released a Mac version of the Google Cloud Print connector for non-cloud printers in the Chrome beta channel. And over the next few days we’ll be enabling printer sharing for current Google Cloud Print users, so your family, friends and colleagues can print their documents from anywhere to anywhere.

Happy printing!

Posted by Abhijit Kalamkar, Software Engineer

Making the web more accessible, one step at a time

christosap — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 17:53:00 +0000

From text that is too small to read, to user interfaces that do not offer keyboard navigation options, users with special needs face a lot of challenges when trying to access websites they are interested in. We believe that extensions can complement the work we are doing to make Google Chrome more accessible and can help users with disabilities turn the web from an often unwelcoming place to an environment they can truly enjoy.

Today we are launching a new category of featured extensions under the name “Accessibility”. On this page you’ll find ChromeVis a brand new extension from Google that allows users with low vision to magnify and change the color of selected text. You will also find extensions like Chrome Daltonize that can help color blind users to see more details in web pages or gleeBox that provides alternatives to actions traditionally performed via the mouse such as clicking, scrolling and selecting text fields.

All users can benefit from these extensions - not just users with disabilities. To encourage more developers to incorporate best practices in accessibility when designing extensions, we’ve open sourced the code behind Chrome Vis and created relevant documentation. You can get more information in the Chromium blog.

One can develop a lot of great extensions to benefit users with special needs. We plan to release a few more in the next months so stay tuned for more updates.

Posted by Jonas Klink, Accessibility Product Manager

Google Data » christosap

Google Cloud Print Ready printers now available

Making the web more accessible, one step at a time