Google Chrome now lets you search and copy text from scanned PDFs
With OCR support for scanned PDFs, you can copy, search, and even use screen readers on text.
If you’ve ever opened a scanned PDF in Chrome and tried to highlight a sentence, you’d have also been met with that frustration that the text wasn’t really text, just an image pretending to be useful. Well, Google just fixed that.
To mark Global Accessibility Awareness Day, Google rolled out this quiet but very useful update to Chrome on desktop: Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for scanned PDFs. This means Chrome can now “see” text embedded inside scanned images, text that was previously locked away like a photo. Now, you can search, copy, and even have that text read aloud by screen readers. You don't need any additional tools or third-party applications.
This update is especially meaningful for the visually impaired. Before, screen readers couldn’t do much with scanned PDFs. Without OCR, they were just static images. But now, screen readers can recognize and vocalize the content. And even if you don’t use a screen reader, the change is a win. Ever tried to copy your passport number from a scanned document or search a 50-page scan for a single name? Now you can.
Louis Eriakha
That’s not the only accessibility update Google dropped. On Chrome for Android, the Page Zoom feature now behaves much more like it does on desktop. Previously, zooming on mobile distorted the whole page layout, making some websites unreadable. With the update, you can increase just the text size without messing up the rest of the page.
All these changes are part of a broader Google strategy of blending AI and accessibility to make tech more humane. Whether it’s TalkBack, now powered by Gemini to describe images on your screen, or smarter captions that recognize when someone says “noooooo” instead of just “no,” Google is showing that they take accessibility seriously.
