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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.'"
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.