[LINK] Google Accessible Search

[Tom Worthington]

Google Labs have introduced for test "Accessible Search" 
<http://labs.google.com/accessible/>. This is designed to find web 
pages usable by blind and visually impaired users.

 From reading the FAQs <http://labs.google.com/accessible/faq.html> 
it seems to do this using a subset of the usual tests performed to 
check web pages for accessibility for the disabled:

"In its current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number 
of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends 
to favor pages that degrade gracefully --- pages with few visual 
distractions and pages that are likely to render well with images turned off."

As well as helping the "visually challenged", Google may help give an 
incentive to web designers to make the web pages more readable generally.

It is not just the blind who have to wade through a lot of visual 
clutter and irrelevant information to get to what they want. When 
advising organizations on the web site I am surprised how often they 
have let irrelevant information, which might be called "window 
dressing", impede the message they are trying to communicate.

Google already provide a mobile web interface which attempts to 
render web pages for users of smart phones and PDAs. Perhaps Google 
can marry up the two efforts, as the W3C accessibility guidelines are 
also intended to cover such devices.

In addition the language used to write the text of a page could be 
looked at. There is now a version of the WikiPedia using simplified 
English, that is a subset of the English language intended to be 
easier to read for non-native English speakers and for machine 
translation: 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/2006/06/simple-english-wikipedia.html>.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml