My first Google Assistant Action – Accessibility quotes

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I decided to try to make my own Google Voice Assistant action that will return quotes on accessibility, universal design and also quotes from famous and less famous people with disabilities on their digital experiences.

Introduction

You can skip the descriptions and go to dedicated webpage for my first Google Assistant action – accessibility quotes. Or you can go to Accessibility Quotes on the Hey Google page directly.

I was doing some research on screen-reader usage online and stumbled upon Google Assistant as an interesting alternative user experience. After observing screen-reader users in real life it is quickly clear that screen-readers are sometimes not enough. Especially users that need or want touch-less interfaces can not really use screen-readers. For them it is much better to use a voice-only user interface. And voice assistants are then an obvious choice.

My experience with voice assistants started and failed very early. On my semi-smart phone I tried to use the auto dialing and it failed almost every time. I am not a native English speaker and I have quite an accent when speaking in English, so it was even harder for the first versions of “voice assistants” to assist me. I’ve seen the trends they are causing lately and I know that machine learning and abundance of data made them much more effective, even for users with strong accents. So I gave it a try and was pleasantly surprised.

Experiencing the real life use of voice assistants with people with disabilities was even more rewarding. Screen-readers are extremely useful and they are still needed for advanced access to digital content, but a lot can also be done with voice assistants. Especially when developers know how to do it. And that was when I got the idea to make my own, custom, voice assistant action.

Motivation behind Accessibility quotes for Google Assistant

I like to learn while doing and I feel that software development allows the fastest possible innovation in the world. As it is abstract and does not need special materials and tools as we would need them if we were trying to create something in the physical world. So I tried to think of a simple voice assistant action that would return answers from my server and not just be some hard-coded test. I’ve noted that there are some voice assistants that are actually games and I was starting to dig into examples but they were using end user details and I wanted to stay away from privacy concerns and make an anonymous proof of concept. So I decided to go for a simple interface that returns quotes from a server that I control.

As I think we need to learn more about users with disabilities, accessibility and universal design it was clear to me what to build – a simple quotes machine that can return quotes on users demand. I went to Google and searched for some related materials first and I even made some quotes of my own. Then I went and made a prototype in Google Developer console, just to try the communication with server part. It was quite easy after I read the basics of “web hooks” that are basically just REST API endpoints.

So the motivation was to learn by doing and to offer some structured data on accessibility, persons with disabilities and universal design under a single voice assistant action.

Way forward – plans for Accessibility Quotes

I will add more relevant quotes, that’s the central part of the solution. After searching for quotes and resources, I’ve experienced some pages that promise to include them but were by far not relevant. It reminded me on automatically generated image alternative texts where some machine learning tries to guess all the objects in the image but fails to relate to context. Manual human verification is still needed for best quality, so I will try to regularly add to the directory. For now I have no plans to crowd-source it but will reevaluate this in the future if public would want it.

Please fell free to go to dedicated webpage for my first Google Assistant action – accessibility quotes. There is also a counter of all quotes (101 for now) and a counter for how many times somebody used the Google Assistant to get the quotes.

Or you can go to Accessibility Quotes on the Hey Google page directly.

Author: Bogdan Cerovac

I am IAAP certified Web Accessibility Specialist (from 2020) and was Google certified Mobile Web Specialist.

Work as digital agency co-owner web developer and accessibility lead.

Sole entrepreneur behind IDEA-lab Cerovac (Inclusion, Diversity, Equity and Accessibility lab) after work. Check out my Accessibility Services if you want me to help your with digital accessibility.

Also head of the expert council at Institute for Digital Accessibility A11Y.si (in Slovenian).

Living and working in Norway (🇳🇴), originally from Slovenia (🇸🇮), loves exploring the globe (🌐).

Nurturing the web from 1999, this blog from 2019.

More about me and how to contact me: