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Accessibility

Use Lookout to take care of daily tasks faster



Everyone has a routine to their day, from pulling out ingredients to cook a meal, sorting through their mail, or perusing through documents. To help people who are blind or low-vision complete these daily tasks faster and more easily, we’re introducing updates to Lookout on Android: new modes, a more accessible design, and expansion to even more Android devices. 


Lookout now has two new modes: Food Label and Scan Document. With Food Label, you can quickly identify packaged foods by pointing your phone’s camera at the label. Lookout will guide you to position the food product so that it can be properly identified through its packaging or barcode. This can be particularly helpful if you’re putting away groceries and want to make sure you’re handling the right items that might feel the same to your touch. For example, Food Label would be able to distinguish between a can of corn and a can of green beans.

Using a phone's camera to identify a bottle of mustard. A blue label pops up on screen identifying the item as "Mustard with pickles, 14oz."

Use Food Label to identify different food products.

Scan Document makes it easier to go through letters and mail. Use Lookout to take a snapshot of a document, and it will capture the entire document’s content in detail so that it can be read aloud by your screen reader.

Using a phone's camera to snapshot a printed letter. After the user takes action, the text of the printed letter is digitized to be read aloud by a screen reader.

Use Scan Document to read long-form documents.

Based on feedback from the blind and low-vision community, we’re introducing an accessible design that is even more compatible with TalkBack, our Android screen reader. This includes making more space for the camera view, which makes it easier to frame the object you want more information about. In addition, we’ve changed navigation between modes to require fewer taps and less time by making it possible to scroll between them at the bottom of the screen. 

With this update, Lookout will be available on all devices with more than 2GB of RAM running Android 6.0 and later. Lookout also now works in French, Italian, German and Spanish. Expanding this app to more people and devices is part of our commitment to make the world's information universally accessible and to build helpful products with and for people with disabilities.

Lookout’s different modes, including its object classifier and OCR models, are powered through TensorFlow Lite, an open source framework for on-device machine learning. Learn more about TensorFlow Lite and Google's other on-device machine learning solutions, including a handy guide to help you pick the right on-device solution for your needs, on our Google Developer On-Device Machine Learning site


Download Lookout today on Google Play.

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