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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.
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.
.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.
CSS can help with this, as it keeps the formatting away from the content, but you still have to keep your
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.
Photoshop, blind, hum ... well
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.