Google Lauded for Accessible Search

With the recent release of a modified version of their search engine, Google is receiving praise from many different groups. The new Google Accessible Search was released as a Google labs project which prioritize pages based on their likelihood of being accessible to visually impaired users after the original search results are returned. From the article: "The best-known guidelines for building an accessible site are the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) from W3C. But these are not the basis of Google's new service. Raman said: 'We don't test against WCAG. We think in the spirit of those guidelines, but we don't test against them verbatim.' Instead he endeavored to identify 'what works for the end-user,' describing a process of 'experimentation, training and machine learning.'"

Comments

Re:In related news

[hankwang]

ANY evidence whatsoever that MSN's search results are less accessible to the blind?

If I use Opera's "ignore author style" mode, it seems that the MSN search homepage is reasonably clean. It's just that the search box doesn't appear earlier than after about 8 pages of links for shopping, news, sports, money, and so on, even though in the formatted version, the search box is near the top of the page. Both in Yahoo Search and the standard Google search, the search box is quite close to the logical top of the page.

Google's page doesn't even XHTML validate!

[rklrkl]

For what's supposed to be an "accessible" search engine page, Google have made pitiful efforts to even bother validating the XHTML (yes it has DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.0 Transitional). Check out the W3C's validation of it - 8 errors, including some outrageous typos like "bgtcolor" instead of "bgcolor" and no closing slashes (required for XHTML) in their <br> tags. I find it amazing that Google would tout such an search engine on its accessibility merits when it doesn't even validate due to blatant errors that are easily fixable.