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Google Lauded for Accessible Search

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the ubiquitous-search dept.

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.'"

12 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Accessibility is better than Flash by Yvan256 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The more accessibility is known, the less we'll have websites made in Flash (or Flash navigation menus, Flash content, etc).

    Flash webmasters: If you can't handle the real Web, you might as well put PDFs online instead of a real website. The Web is not TV, the Web is not a bitmap graphic, the Web is not a newspaper. You can't assume anything about the reader (text, speech, screen size (if any), download speed, etc). Or at least stop calling your Flash files "websites". Thanks.

    1. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by Bogtha · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The more accessibility is known, the less we'll have websites made in Flash (or Flash navigation menus, Flash content, etc).

      Sadly, this isn't the case. Using Flash doesn't make something less accessible, even older versions without support for screenreaders. It's when people use Flash without a fallback that accessibility problems arise. And of course, the latest versions of Flash have support for alternative user-agents built in.

      The stupid web developers that annoy people with improper use of Flash can continue to annoy people and still create perfectly accessible websites. Accessibility != usability.

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      Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
    2. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Even modern Flash's support for accessibility is crap. Alternative content is fine, but people thinking that Flash has 'support for alternative user-agents built in' is madly misleading.

    3. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If your flash site has a fallback then you can just host the fallback, you don't need the flash site anymore.

    4. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 2, Insightful
      The Web is not TV
      The web is whatever I feel like putting on it. Or hadn't you heard?
      --
      Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
    5. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by Twillerror · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Wow what a rant, that got up to 5 ( Insightful ). Way to go slashdot.

      HTML/CSS/JavaScript like any technology is getting old. It wasn't designed to really be for applications. Now we have Ajax hacks and a slew of other crap to try and make it like a normal desktop app...things that flash and java applets ( yes I know applets are not that great ) just do.

      Flash can be just as accesible if not more then a web page...it is all in the tools that make it accesible. Imagine if I wrote a flash app specifically for blind people...I'm guessing I could get a lot further then with just a web page.
      Instead of trying to make a page accessible...i'd rather see a version of the app written specifically for blind people. It'd be better if google or other companies teamed up with another company, give them the raw content as XML and let them expose it in a way that will make it easier to access. Browser are inherently visual are they not....maybe it'd make more sense for google to try and expose the information in a way that could be converted to brail or audio easily.

      Yes there are issues.
      http://www.webaim.org/techniques/flash/

      I'm sorry to the individuals out there that have disabilities. At the same time some content that is very hard if not impossible to make accessible can make it far easy to access for people without a disablity to use it. We need to find ways to appease both communities.

      What does the poster mean by the "real Web". And they SHOULD just post PDFs on the side of their content, they are way more accesible then HTML. I mean I'm sure you could get a program to read the content of a PDF far easier then you could get it to strip out text from an html document and read it.

    6. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by metamatic · · Score: 4, Insightful
      HTML/CSS/JavaScript like any technology is getting old. It wasn't designed to really be for applications.

      C is also getting old, and wasn't designed to be used for applications, or for any kind of graphical UI. So what?

      --
      GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
    7. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by Yvan256 · · Score: 2, Insightful
      Most of them don't even consider the possibility that somebody would have Flash installed but prefer the alternative content.

      Such as myself. I usually surf using Safari with the plug-ins disabled. There's nothing more annoying than arriving at an empty white/black page that does absolutely nothing... because it's a "Flash intro" with the "skip button" inside the flash.

      News Flash: websites don't need an "intro" or "splash" page... The "main page" should be the "entry page" (like Slashdot, for example).
    8. Re:Accessibility is better than Flash by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It's all about speed.

      HTML/CSS are incredibly clumsy to work with, but that can be solved with things like Dojo. But there are some things you really can't speed up -- JavaScript is interpreted pretty much everywhere, and HTML/CSS must be interpreted, because the JavaScript could be modifying the HTML source at any time.

      But it's also incredibly difficult to extend HTML/CSS, since even the most recent standard versions will probably never be supported by Internet Exploder. This means that very few new things are ever added that could be useful to an AJAX developer, because anything new will only be supported in one browser, or none at all.

      Thus, web applications will always be slower-running, and will probably be slower to develop for a very long time. But C can be almost pleasant to develop in, due to the massive amount of work that's been put into libraries, and it's also fast enough that it's almost a standard benchmark for measuring the speed of other languages.

      I am not saying I prefer C, but I don't think C needs to be replaced. But much about the web really does. PHP is hideously ugly, Ruby is ungodly slow, and AJAX is both and then some.

      --
      Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  2. Visual CAPTCHAs in Google's own services by tepples · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Wouldn't Google Accounts and Gmail have a lower HandiRank because the sign-up page requires responding to a visual CAPTCHA? In fact, Gmail requires two: one for the confirmation of a mobile phone service commitment (most phones don't support text to speech for SMS) and one for the Google account.

    1. Re:Visual CAPTCHAs in Google's own services by Arker · · Score: 3, Insightful

      I don't think that's exactly true. Notice that they do NOT rank themselves highly on their own accessible search. They aren't cheating here. They do have some problems, but every indication is that they'll be fixing them, not obfuscating like the competition would do.

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      =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
      Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
  3. W3C by ManoSinistra · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It is my understanding that part of the "Accessible" algorithm that ranks pages is how well the website follows W3C compliant code (HTML, XHTML, and so forth). If that is so, that's great. It may force people to not only consider good keywords and descriptions as far as SEO goes, but to also make their code more standards-compliant.