Cross posted on the Official Google Blog

Imagine trying to keep track of another person’s real-time edits in a document—using only your ears. Or trying to create a table from spreadsheet data—without being able to clearly see the cells. Whether you’re backing up a file in Drive or crunching some numbers in Sheets, it should be easy to bring your ideas to life using Google’s tools. But if you’re blind or have low vision, you may need to rely on assistive technologies such as screen readers and Braille displays—and that can make working in the cloud challenging. While screen readers can parse static webpages (like this blog) relatively easily, it’s much harder for them to know what to say in interactive applications like Google Docs because the actions they need to describe are much more complex.

With these reasons in mind, today we’re announcing some improvements to Drive and all our editors—Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, and Forms—specifically designed with blind and low-vision users in mind.
Improved screen reader support in Drive and Docs 
In June, we introduced a new version of Drive that’s sleeker, easier to navigate and much faster. But just as importantly, the new Drive also includes better keyboard accessibility, support for zoom and high-contrast mode and improved usability with screen readers.

Across Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings and Forms, you’ll find that it’s now much easier to use a screen reader, with nicer text-to-voice verbalization and improvements to keyboard navigation. You’ll also notice other updates, including:

• Support for alt text on images in Docs, so you can tell a screen reader what they should say to describe an image 
• Better support for using a keyboard to edit charts and pivot tables in Sheets 
• Additional screen reader improvements specifically for Docs, Sheets and Slides, including support for spelling suggestions, comments and revision history 
• The ability to quickly search the menus and perform actions in Docs, Slides and Drawings (and soon Sheets and Forms)—even if you don’t know the action’s key sequence 
  

Collaborating with others is easier too: in Docs, Sheets, Slides or Drawings, screen readers announce when people enter or leave the document, and you’ll now also hear when others are editing alongside you.

Refreshable Braille display support 
If you use a Braille display, you can now use it to read and enter text in Docs, Slides and Drawings. Even if you don't use a Braille display, with Braille support, your screen reader’s settings for character echoing are automatically followed. Enabling Braille also dramatically reduces the lag between when you press a key and when it’s announced by your screen reader, and improves the announcements of punctuation and whitespace. Learn how to enable Braille support in our Help Center.

Get up and going faster
The first time you use a screen reader or a Braille display, getting up to speed can be a daunting task. But it’s simpler with new step-by-step guides for Drive, Docs, Sheets, Slides, Forms and Drawings.
You can also access the in-product “Help” menu at any time without interrupting your work, or use the updated shortcut help dialog to easily search through keyboard shortcuts if you don’t remember them.

Finally, we’re offering phone support for Google Drive accessibility questions. If you get stuck, visit support.google.com/drive to request a phone call and someone from our team will reach out to you.

What’s next
Referring to recent updates to Google Drive, Dr. Marc Maurer, President of the National Federation of the Blind, said at this year’s National Convention: “The progress...during the last few months has just been positively extraordinary.” We’re pleased the community has welcomed these improvements, and will continue to work with organizations like the NFB to make even more progress.

Everyone, regardless of ability, should be able to experience all that the web has to offer. To find out more about our commitment to a fully accessible web, visit the new Google Accessibility site at www.google.com/accessibility.

Posted by: Alan Warren, Vice President, Engineering

Starting today, things are about to get cleaner—and more colorful—in Docs, Sheets, Slides, Drawings, Forms and Apps Script. First, you’ll notice each editor’s product icon displayed in the header, which doubles as a quick link back to all your files in Drive. Next, you’ll see that the header is more streamlined and compact, helping you to focus on what matters most—your content.

We hope these updates make your creation and collaboration experience just a bit more delightful. Enjoy!

Posted by Sarah Cooper, User Experience Designer

Fresh on the heels of adding discussions to Google presentations and the ability to edit within the Google Docs Android app, we’ve been hard at work on a few other new features to enhance your Google Docs experience.

All your comments--in one tidy place
We just added the discussions feature to Google drawings, and today we’re making it even easier to see a log of all of the comments that have been made whether you’re using drawings, documents, or presentations. Just click on the “Comments” button in the upper right corner of the editor to see a complete history of your discussions. You can reply in line, resolve or re-open comments, link directly to a comment, or change notification settings--without ever leaving the “Comments” menu.


Better text search for PDFs and images 
Last month, we launched a feature to let you search for text inside the PDFs in your documents list. Now, using the same optical character recognition technology, you can search for and copy highlighted text when you open a scanned PDF, like a fax or hotel receipt.


It’s not just stuff in your documents list: we’ve also made text in PDFs and images uploaded to Google Sites searchable.

And that’s not all... 
In addition to the features that were released today, over the last few weeks we’ve also made a bunch of other changes that you may have noticed. Now you can:

• Add custom Javascript and CSS to your Google Sites 
• See full names in document and presentation comments (instead of showing email addresses) 
• Use keyboard shortcuts for navigating between table cells in documents 
• Cancel running scripts from the Google Apps Script editor 
• Add donut charts and error bars in spreadsheets 

Posted by Ian Kilpatrick, Software Engineer

This week in Docs, we’re introducing three new tools that put the fun in functional.

Format painter in Google documents

First, we’ve added a format painter to help you copy formatting within Google documents. The new format painter allows you to copy the style of your text, including font, size, color and other formatting options and apply it somewhere else in your document. To use the format painter, select the text for the formatting you want to copy, press the paintbrush button in your toolbar, and then select the text where you want to apply that formatting.

If you double-click on the format painter icon, you’ll enter a mode that lets you select multiple sections of text so you can apply the same formatting to each section.

You can also use keyboard shortcuts for format painting. To copy the style of your selected text, press Ctrl+Option+C for Mac or Ctrl+Alt+C for Windows. To apply any copied styles to whatever text you have selected, press Ctrl+Option+V for Mac or Ctrl+Alt+V for Windows.

Google Fusion Tables in documents list

With this week’s update, we’re also integrating Google Fusion Tables into your documents list. Google Fusion Tables is a data management web application that makes it easy to gather, visualize and collaborate on data online. Now you’ll be able to store and share your Fusion Tables with the rest of the files in your documents list.

Recently, people have used Google Fusion Tables to:

• Visualize evacuation zones for New York City during Hurricane Irene
  
• Host data sets made public by the State of California
  
• Gather data from local flu shot clinics for Google Flu Vaccine Finder
  
• Map shelters and road status during the tsunami crisis in Japan

Go to Create new > Table from your documents list menu to get started visualizing or sharing tables of data in .csv, .xls or .kml files.

We're working on making Google Fusion Tables available to Google Apps customers and will let you know as soon as they are. Take a tour to learn more about Google Fusion Tables.

Drag & drop images in Google drawings

We also made it easier to add images from your desktop to Google drawings. If you’re using the latest version of Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, you can now drag an image from your desktop and drop it directly in the drawing canvas.


Give these tools a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Posted by: Micah Lemonick, Software Engineer

Updated 9/13 to add shortcuts for Windows

This week in Docs, we have a couple of new features that we hope make your life easier (and more visual). Read on.

Copying and pasting drawings across docs
Starting today, we’re adding support for the web clipboard to the embedded drawing editor so that you can work with drawings within documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. This means that you can now copy shapes from one document and paste them into existing drawings in another doc. You can also use the web clipboard to move a drawing from a document into the standalone drawing editor.


To try this out, open a new document and go to Insert > Drawing to create a drawing in the embedded drawing editor. Click the web clipboard icon and Copy shapes to web clipboard.


Open another doc that you want to paste the drawing into. Click the web clipboard icon and hover to preview the available items -- then, click to paste when you’ve located the drawing you’d like to use.

Better support for right-to-left tables
We’ve also made an improvement to tables that will be useful for Hebrew and Arabic users. If you’ve enabled right-to-left controls from your docs list settings, you’ll now have an option to create tables that are visually right-to-left. This means that the first cell in the table will be in the upper right and that tabbing through the table will move you to the left and down. You can modify a table’s directionality from the table properties dialog.


We hope you enjoy these new features. As always, let us know what you think in the forums and stay tuned for more updates in the next This week in Docs blog post.

Posted by: Aharon Lanin, Software Engineer

Today we’re releasing a bunch of new features in Google Drawings, designed to make editing easier and more collaborative.

Presence + Revision history
Google Docs has always been designed to make it easy to work on documents together. We’re making that easier in drawings by introducing two new features. First, we’ve added presence highlights around shapes. The color that you see beside a person’s name in the sidebar is now used to highlight the shapes which that person has selected. In the example below, mfrederick is editing the triangle at the edge of the drawing.

When you’re working on drawings together it’s really helpful to see who made which change and to be able to go back to previous versions. That’s just what we’ve added. We took the new revisions interface from documents and spreadsheets and brought it to the drawings editor. Now it’s easy to see all the edits that went into your drawing. You’ll also see the full revision history for any drawings that you’ve already created.

We’ve been keeping busy this year with over 85 new enhancements to Google Docs and Google Sites, making it possible for you to work, communicate and collaborate entirely in the cloud. We wanted to take a moment to share a few of the most exciting enhancements from 2010 that are making it easier for you to go “100% web.”

In addition to some of the most requested favorite features like mobile editing, OCR, advanced sorting rules and a more consistent look, here are more of our team’s favorite things from this last year:

• A new Google Docs built from the ground up for real-time collaboration
• The new Google drawings editor for making flowcharts, diagrams and more
• Upload and store your files in the cloud and stop worrying about losing files
• Simplified sharing with new features like “Private”
• New charts editor and chart types because pictures are worth 1000 words
• New revision history UI in documents and spreadsheets make it easier to see what has changed
• Horizontal navigation in Sites gives you more options when building your sites
• More fonts in documents provide you with more ways to express yourself
• Formula highlighting in spreadsheets makes it easier to understand your formulas
• Google Docs demo makes it easier for anyone to try Google Docs

We look forward to bringing you more improvements next year. Let us know what is at the top of your Google Docs and Sites wish list in the comments.

On behalf of the entire the Google Docs and Google Sites teams, happy holidays! We’ll see you in the New Year!

Posted by: Jonathan Rochelle, Director, Product Management

If you’re reading this post, you’ve probably seen your fair share of Google Docs videos featured on this blog. Well, we have one more to show you this year, created entirely with Google Docs, demonstrating the power of nothing but the web -- and it just might be our favorite yet.

Google introduced Demo Slam in October 2010 as a way to turn traditionally boring tech demonstrations into out-of-this-world displays of technology. A couple of weeks ago, three animators worked together for three days in three different cities to create a Google Docs demo slam using Google presentations and drawings. Take a look:



If you like what you see, vote for “Epic Docs Animation.” Let the Slam begin!

Posted by: Tu Uthaisri, Google Creative Lab

With the new addition of connectors in Google drawings, it’s easier than ever to build anything from a family tree to a flowchart in just a few minutes.

In honor of the holidays, we thought we’d create a bracket-style showdown between our favorite types of pie.

Select Shape from the Insert menu, and you’ll see a variety of bubbles, arrows, and symbols to choose from. I used the rounded rectangle shape for this example, but you can select the shape that’s best for your flowchart.


From there, you can double-click on individual bubbles to enter text.


When you select and drag a particular object, the snap to guides will help you line it up with other objects.


Hold Shift and click to select multiple objects at once. This allows you to move these objects around as a group.



Next, use our newly launched connector tool to attach lines to your shapes. Even if you move or rotate your shapes, they’ll stay connected.


In just a few steps, you’ll have created an organizational chart that you can share, download, or embed into another Google doc. Try it out for yourself.


Want to know what else you can do in Google drawings? Check out our template gallery for more inspiration.

Posted by: Teresa Wu, Consumer Operations Associate

Many of you have visited our Product Ideas page to let us know what features you’d like to see in Google Docs or what you think we’re missing. Your participation was astounding: we received over 165,000 votes on over 5,000 ideas from thousands of people around the world over the course of a year. Here are just a few of the things we launched in the last year that accomplish many of the things you’ve been asking for:

• Real-time collaboration. While we’ve had real-time collaboration in spreadsheets since 2006, we enhanced our collaboration in documents in April 2010 to be truly real-time. Now you can follow along character-by-character with your friends, family and colleagues.
• Google Docs on mobile devices. You can now view and edit on your Google Docs on the go.
• Convert more file types to Google Docs format. You can convert a variety of file types - from .doc to .txt to .pdf - to Google Docs format and vice versa.
• Optical Character Recognition (OCR). This new feature interprets scanned files and PDF files and converts them to Google documents format.
• A stand-alone drawings editor. You requested a mind mapping tool, and we delivered Google drawings. And to make your mind maps and drawings even better, we just added connectors.
• Chat in documents, presentations and spreadsheets. Now you can ask fellow collaborators a question right in the document.
• A more consistent look for all Google Docs editors. Documents, presentations and spreadsheets used to have different interfaces and varying menus.
• Advanced sorting rules and in-cell drop down lists. These two features in Google spreadsheets now make your spreadsheet editing and organization more streamlined.

We’re starting a new process with the Product Ideas page to make sure we keep it fresh and avoid favoring older posts. We’ve temporarily closed the page to new posts to gather a comprehensive look at your ideas thus far and to restructure our Product Ideas sessions.

In order to get the most precise feedback possible, the new Product Ideas sessions will be targeted at a specific feature, product or idea. These sessions will happen every three months or so for a few weeks at a time. As we receive new ideas on the Product Ideas page, we’ll keep working hard to implement the top requests and ideas that are posted. We’ll let you all know when the ideas page is open and post ongoing updates here on the blog and in the help forum.

Posted by: Julia Harter, Consumer Operations Associate

Yesterday we added a new import type for Google drawings: Windows Metafile (WMF) . It’s an image format that’s designed to be scalable. Unlike other image formats (PNG, JPEG, etc.) WMF files use vectors to represent pictures so that no matter how much you stretch an image, it will never look pixelated.

To import a WMF file to Google drawings, start with a WMF file you own on your computer like this one:


Go to the upload page in Google Docs, and select the image that you’ll be uploading. Make sure to check the box to automatically convert files to the corresponding Google Docs formats.

Ever since we launched the Google drawings, the most requested feature has been shape connectors. Well today, they’re here.

From now on, when you add a new line in a Google drawing, you can connect that line directly to a shape (old lines will need to be replaced with new lines). Think of connectors as the glue that keeps your drawings together: no matter how much you move around or rotate your shapes, the lines attached to them will stretch so that the shapes stay connected.

To use a connector, start drawing a line and move your cursor near an existing shape. You’ll see small red dots, showing you the points on the shape that you can connect to. Release your mouse when you’re hovering over a point, to connect the line to that point.

From connectors in drawings to hidden controls, we have a lot of updates to share this week:

Connectors in drawings
Since we launched Google drawings in April, the most requested feature has been line connectors. Starting today, all new lines can connect to shapes making it easier to create flowcharts and complex diagrams.

Insert images directly from Picasa
If you’ve got images stored in your Picasa web albums, the image dialog will let you insert those images directly into documents and drawings.



Hidden controls
A couple weeks ago, we introduced compact controls to the document editor. This week we’re bringing compact controls to the drawing editor as well. We also added a new feature to both documents and drawings: hidden controls. Choosing View -> Hide controls will hide the title bar, menu bar, and toolbar. Once you’ve hidden the controls, you can always press Esc to make them appear again.

WMF upload
We now support uploading WMF (Windows Metafile) files and converting them into Google drawings.

Stay tuned for in-depth posts throughout the rest of the week.

Posted by: Jeffrey Harris, Product Manager

A few months ago, my colleague Julia and I were at a technology conference for educators. Teachers were very enthusiastic when we demonstrated working together on documents at the same time and were really excited about how they could use it in their classrooms. What surprised us though, was how many of our favorite features - like working together at the same time - were brand new to them.

We knew we wanted to share that same excitement with even more people. Inspired by the Search Stories videos, we set off to tell a story using Google Docs. The result is this video:



We hope you enjoy seeing some of the cool features Google Docs offers in action. And if you think your friends would like it, show it to them too!

Posted by: Bryan Carroll, Consumer Operations Strategist, Google Docs

Have you recently toiled over instructions to assemble furniture? Now imagine the agony if you had no illustrations to fall back on. What’s the best way to teach kids about nutrition without a food pyramid?

Sometimes when working with text you realize that words can only articulate so much. And that’s why we have drawings in Google documents. Drawings can be useful for things like diagramming processes in a flowchart or clearly articulating the relationship between a groups of ideas.

Sometimes scribbles just don’t cut it and you need more powerful curve tools in Google drawings. Well, we’ve just released a tool that does just that, based on cardinal splines.

The new curves can be left open or closed, and can be filled or unfilled. You can also adjust points on the curve after drawing it.


Most importantly, this tool is fun. You can freehand a nice logo, like this:

Want to add “Googlers” to your document dictionary? (It is a real word, you know...) Need to resize columns and rows in a table? Want to get rid of that pesky ruler permanently? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to copy your Google drawing into your documents? You can with a few new small updates to Google documents.

Add words to your dictionary

You can add words to the spellchecking dictionary by right-clicking on any word that’s marked as misspelled and selecting Add to dictionary.

In a visual application like Google drawings, we know the details count, which is why we’re excited to announce another batch of features and shortcuts that will help you refine your drawings. Create a drawing to check them out.

Zoom improvements
We’ve added several new and simple ways to zoom in and out within a drawing: a zoom tool on the toolbar; the ability to draw a rectangle around an area to zoom; zoom levels to the View menu; and keyboard shortcuts to zoom in (Ctrl Shift → or Cmd Shift → on a Mac) and zoom out (Ctrl Shift ← or Cmd Shift ← on a Mac).


Pie and arc drawing improvements
Once you’ve selected the pie or arc shape, drag from the center point, then release to set the radius, move your mouse along the circumference to set the angle, then click when you’re done. Hint - you can hold shift during step 2 to constrain your arc to 15 degree increments.

You can also select Edit > Change Shape to toggle between a pie shape and arc shape.