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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.'"

7 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 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?

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  2. 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.

  3. 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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