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."

Comments

Microsoft.com NOT "accessible"

[AugustZephyr]

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

one of the best tool ever

[mu22le]

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.

Google Accessible in not according to W3C standard

[giriz]

http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flab s.google.com%2Faccessible%2F (neither is any of google's web pages).

Re:Still missing the point.

[laffer1]

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.

Re:What?

[illuminix]

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.