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Google Accessible Search Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the what-about-one-for-people-like-me dept.

Philipp Lenssen writes "Google today released Accessible Search, a Google Labs product aiming to rank higher pages which are optimized for blind users. Google asks you to adhere to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines if you want to make sure your pages are accessible (and thus, rank better on Google Accessible Search). I wrote a small tool to compare results of default and accessible results."

1 of 134 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Hmm... by Shimdaddy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Blind people can use screen readers, but if you bury your content in flash or in images without alt text, it makes it very difficult (impossible really) for the screen reader to know what to say. Also, if you position everything in tables and it loads in a weird order but looks right when it hits the screen, it presents problems, since the reader won't know that the 5 rows down actually explains the 3 columns over.

    CSS can help with this, as it keeps the formatting away from the content, but you still have to keep your .html (or .php or whatever) source files nice, clean and logical. A simple test is, if you can read your source file easily (ie in notepad or vi or whatever) then you're probably ok.