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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."
I somehow think that a search for "Adobe", "Photoshop", etc. will still give you adobe.com as the #1 result, despite its accessibility problems.
FYI: Slashdot.org is an "accessible page" http://www.google.com/u/accessible?cx=accessible!& q=slashdot&btnG=Search
So is digg.com:
http://www.google.com/u/accessible?hl=en&lr=&ie=IS O-8859-1&cx=accessible!&q=digg&btnG=Search
But microsoft.com is not:
http://www.google.com/u/accessible?hl=en&lr=&ie=IS O-8859-1&cx=accessible!&q=microsoft&btnG=Search
I didn't get it initially but this is one of the best tool google ever gave us, most spam sites designer do not care for standards and are left out of the 'accessible' results. I think I'm going to switch to the new sevice soon.
With Google's "Accessable search", sites will be able to tell from their weblogs how many visitors are coming in via the "accessable search" route. So it will be possible to figure out the financial benefit of web accessability. If it turns out to be low, even for pages that Google thinks are "accessable", there's a business case for not bothering with "accessability".
It seems I'm not being served any sponsored links on this one. Nice. I also note that searching for "white house" will put the Wikipedia article above the official home page, as opposed to what happens on the regular search.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flab s.google.com%2Faccessible%2F
(neither is any of google's web pages).
I don't want a signature.
It depends. If you actually talk to a blind person, tables aren't as annoying as people using characters between links. For instance, doing navigation with a pipe (vertical bar) or some other character sounds strange to them. I worked for someone who was blind and owned their own business for a time. He said cnet was one of the most annoying web properties for him to use. At the time their navigation sounded terrible and was quite randomly placed. He also didn't like navigation at the top as much except on the first page. Worst of all, he hated hearing. about us vertical bar products veritcal bar etc...
Oh and he used Internet explorer. His software tied in with that so it looked like an ie hit and even tried to load all the crap everyone else deals with in IE. He did IE on windows using a dell.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
My son is blind. He uses the web with a reader, and loves google. He searches for music, among other things. It's pretty amazing how effecient he is with it, given he can't see. Some sites work better than others. It is possible to optimize a site for the blind. You're ignorant.
http://cubemonkey.net/quotes -- fortune-mod quote generator
Has anyone ever had the problem of trying to find song lyrics and being bombed with pages full of nonsence?! First time I tried with this interface I got the exact results I was wanting. So I know now that this is better for lyrics... what else would it be better for?
The w3c check is not an acurate measure on how thruly accessible the pages are
I now this because I have friends who are blind and frecuently use screen reader applications
If you really want to make sure your pages are accessible then download the trial version of Jaws for Windows wich is the defacto standard screen reader. This trial is limited to 40 minutes per session, but those 40 minutes should be enough to test your webpages.
As mentioned in posts above, make sure the content can be reaced quickly by readers.
Which raises an interesting point. What would happen if Google were to rank pages with valid html slightly higher that pages that don't validate properly?
XP is basicly 98 with a lot more extra features to hunt down and disable. --Dram
A common misconception is that website accessibility only benefits blind people. Accessible, semantically-structured websites are good for many things, most notably Search Engine Optimisation and cutting down on bandwidth. How's that for financial benefit?