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Google Accessible Search Released
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."
From the Accessible Search FAQ:
How can sites make their content more accessible to the blind?
Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more useable and accessible include keeping Web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter -- especially extraneous content -- and ensuring that the primary purpose of the Web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation
I wish more sites where like that. Do you want info? You get it right there, without all the mumbo-jumbo associated with most current websites.
As opposed to the inaccessible search one gets on http://www.google.cn/ ?
+ is+good&meta=
http://www.google.cn/search?hl=zh-CN&q=falun+gong
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
There has been standards for blind web browsing for many years! The problem is that hardly anyone use them, even a lot of government web sites which by law must be accessible.
The amazing thing is that google, by page-ranking these pages higher, I believe it will do more to improve web accessibility than any law or standards organisation could.
--jeffk++
ipv6 is my vpn
blind people. i think we all can benefit from this simple and straightforward representation of search results. i actually like the new accessible interface. it was a kind decision by google to not put any ads in their accessible search. i think more people will use the google accessible search than just the blind people.
so, has anyone tried using any of the screen reading software to test whether search results are actually readable without looking at the screen?
and also what about keyboard shortcuts? since blind people can't use mouse, there must be some other way for them to find a search box / search result, right?
Check out Pandora by Music Genome Project
Tables should be used to mark up truly tabular information ("data tables"). Content developers should avoid using them to lay out pages ("layout tables"). Tables for any use also present special problems to users of screen readers (refer to checkpoint 10.3).
Even Google's ultra-simple front page violates this guideline, despite zero need to do so.
Point 3 of the guidelines says this:
Mark up documents with the proper structural elements. Control presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes.
But if you dig into the source of google.com, you see cruft like this:Google fails rather dramatically to implement any web standard, not even including a doctype. These problems aren't limited to their front page, either. news.google.com is just as bad or worse.
This is really a shame. The content that google presents is lightweight and free of the layout challenges that can sometimes make web standards difficult to follow: Google should be the perfect test case for perfect standards and accessibility. Instead, it's a throwback to 1996 web design. That they're launching a tool to test accessibility to the blind is incredibly ironic.
I stole this sig from someone cleverer than me.
In fact, the opposite seems to be true - the Olympics was successfully sued over their website being inaccessible, and so was Target. As a consequence, it seems, more and more business are finding reason to make a case for web accessibility - whether they consider themselves a target or not.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
That's utter nonsense. First off, you think blind people can't process information? WTF?
Second, it's not even about 'optimising for the blind' so much as simply 'using (rather than abusing) the web.' The web was designed from the start to deliver information in a neutral format so that the user-agent (browser) could then deliver that information appropriately. This may mean laying it out on a screen (of unknown dimensions and capability,) or it may mean speaking it aloud, or whatever. Proper web design is accessible to everyone. The errors that make sites inaccessible to the blind are the same errors that make them annoying and sometimes unusable to the rest of us as well.
Keep in mind that you cannot dictate layout and use html properly and you'll have no problem. Ignore that fact and you shut out a lot of people, not just the blind.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Yes and no. On the one hand, WCAG does have acknowledged shortcomings and it's certainly no guarantee. But aural browsers and screenreaders tend to be absolutely awful when it comes to supporting the markup that's intended to help them. They aren't designed to read accessible websites, they are designed to scrape as much meaning as they can out of inaccessible websites.
So from a practical perspective, yes, you need to test in individual assistive user-agents if you want your website to be as usable as possible by disabled people. But when the markup is fine according to the W3C and assistive user-agents get it wrong, it's usually because the developers of the assistive user-agents haven't even heard of the W3C.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The reason is of course not that Google cannot make a page without the use of tables or the font tag, but that the pages work with even the oldest of browsers (except IE 2.0 which doesn't do tables). You can't DIV or CSS your way around that. Big sites like Google and Yahoo have always been breaking rules, either for speed (not using quotes etc.) or for backward compatability. W3C is nice but doesn't earn you money.