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Google Accessible Search Released

Posted by timothy on Thu Jul 20, 2006 11:27 AM
from the what-about-one-for-people-like-me dept.
Businesses Google The Internet IT
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google today released Accessible Search, a Google Labs product aiming to rank higher pages which are optimized for blind users. Google asks you to adhere to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines if you want to make sure your pages are accessible (and thus, rank better on Google Accessible Search). I wrote a small tool to compare results of default and accessible results."
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  • From the Accessible Search FAQ:

    How can sites make their content more accessible to the blind?

    Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more useable and accessible include keeping Web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter -- especially extraneous content -- and ensuring that the primary purpose of the Web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation

    I wish more sites where like that. Do you want info? You get it right there, without all the mumbo-jumbo associated with most current websites.
    • I am not visually impaired, but since I'm surfing with out-of-date or text-only browsers every now and then, I get similar issues that I'd like to add:

      Get rid of flash/java/javascript for anything related to navigation on the site! These things are nice for showing a movie, or a small program, but not for main content and navigation

      A completely cluttered page with an option added afterwards to see it in larger fonts is still a cluttered page! Once I saw a site for local elections where there was a link

      • Re:Accessible Content (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Igmuth (146229) on Thursday July 20 2006, @12:06PM (#15750971)
        Once I saw a site for local elections where there was a link to the part of the site for visually impaired people (large font page),
        Wait... are you saying that they had an entire seperate page that they made simply made the font larger? That is insane. The idea of accessible web pages is that if people need a larger font size, they should be able to select that larger font size in their viewer of choice, and it shouldn't break your page. (I.e. no images as text, etc)
    • I tried searching for Porn and the 5th link down was to this article [theregister.co.uk] on the Register that claims Porn makes you blind. :(

  • At some point it doesn't matter... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MudButt (853616) on Thursday July 20 2006, @11:41AM (#15750769)
    I somehow think that a search for "Adobe", "Photoshop", etc. will still give you adobe.com as the #1 result, despite its accessibility problems [contentquality.com].

      • you seemed to have missed the point of this service.. its not just that the google site is accessible, it's that google actually sorts the results showing more accessible sites first.. meaning google says when searching "microsoft" there are more accessible sites than microsoft so it displays them first, whereas searching for slashdot or digg shows slashdot and digg as result 1 meaning google considers the two sites to be accessable

  • one of the best tool ever (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mu22le (766735) on Thursday July 20 2006, @11:44AM (#15750794) Homepage Journal
    I didn't get it initially but this is one of the best tool google ever gave us, most spam sites designer do not care for standards and are left out of the 'accessible' results. I think I'm going to switch to the new sevice soon.

  • This could backfire (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Animats (122034) on Thursday July 20 2006, @11:53AM (#15750861) Homepage
    With Google's "Accessable search", sites will be able to tell from their weblogs how many visitors are coming in via the "accessable search" route. So it will be possible to figure out the financial benefit of web accessability. If it turns out to be low, even for pages that Google thinks are "accessable", there's a business case for not bothering with "accessability".
    • Good point! Don't forget to factor in the cost of prosecution under anti-discrimination legislation if you plan on doing business somewhere like the EU or USA which makes accessibility a requirement though...
    • In fact, the opposite seems to be true - the Olympics [contenu.nu] was successfully sued [tomw.net.au] over their website being inaccessible, and so was Target [sfgate.com]. As a consequence, it seems, more and more business are finding reason to make a case for web accessibility [wordpress.com] - whether they consider themselves a target or not.

      • The Olympics was an Australian case. Target was not "successfully sued"; that's still pending. Southwest Airlines won a case over that issue, Access Now vs. Southwest. [bytowninternet.com]; their "virtual ticket counter" does not have to be handicapped-accessable. Access Now appealed, and the Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit rejected the appeal. [findlaw.com] That's the only final US court decision on the subject to date.

        As the court put it, it's up to Congress to change the ADA if Congress wants it to apply to the Internet.

        • Nothing in your parent post mentioned the US specifically at all. So why are you now using that to make your case for why accessibility doesn't matter? Just because the US hasn't specifically passed legislation addressing the issue doesn't mean it isn't one.

          The point I was trying to make is that it would be shortsighted and possibly very stupid for major companies to be ignoring web accessibility.
    • A common misconception is that website accessibility only benefits blind people. Accessible, semantically-structured websites are good for many things, most notably Search Engine Optimisation and cutting down on bandwidth. How's that for financial benefit?
  • Finally I can start using Links2 or even Lynx to start browsing or any other curses based browser... mmm... gopher. Will work perfectly with my pine mail and telnet based IRC.

    I really commend google for providing us and maybe even forcing webdevelopers to use decent, W3C compatible standards. This means soon enough, we'll have websites that aren't IE compatible.

     
    • This means soon enough, we'll have websites that aren't IE compatible.
      Ah ha! So that's Google's master plan! Pretty good plan if you ask me.. make the web better AND get rid of Microsoft.

      I like MS technologies as much as the next guy (.NET has some pretty good stuff) but.. I think they're a dinosaur and dinosaurs tend to stifle innovation.
  • It seems I'm not being served any sponsored links on this one. Nice. I also note that searching for "white house" will put the Wikipedia article above the official home page, as opposed to what happens on the regular search.
  • blind people. i think we all can benefit from this simple and straightforward representation of search results. i actually like the new accessible interface. it was a kind decision by google to not put any ads in their accessible search. i think more people will use the google accessible search than just the blind people.
    so, has anyone tried using any of the screen reading software to test whether search results are actually readable without looking at the screen?
    and also what about keyboard shortcuts? sinc

  • Google Accessible in not according to W3C standard (Score:4, Interesting)

    by giriz (966704) on Thursday July 20 2006, @12:05PM (#15750957)
    http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Flab s.google.com%2Faccessible%2F [w3.org]
    (neither is any of google's web pages).
  • From what I've read of the guidelines, my website gopher://gopherrulez.org [gopherrulez.org] just won't cut it!
  • So does this mean instead of "grow your manhood in just 2 weeks with these pillZ" they're going to get "get your eyesight back in just two weeks with these sweet pillZ"?
  • Has anyone ever had the problem of trying to find song lyrics and being bombed with pages full of nonsence?! First time I tried with this interface I got the exact results I was wanting. So I know now that this is better for lyrics... what else would it be better for?

  • For Thruly accessible webpages (Score:3, Interesting)

    by guabah (968691) on Thursday July 20 2006, @01:05PM (#15751368)

    The w3c check is not an acurate measure on how thruly accessible the pages are

    I now this because I have friends who are blind and frecuently use screen reader applications

    If you really want to make sure your pages are accessible then download the trial version of Jaws for Windows [freedomscientific.com] wich is the defacto standard screen reader. This trial is limited to 40 minutes per session, but those 40 minutes should be enough to test your webpages.

    As mentioned in posts above, make sure the content can be reaced quickly by readers.

    • Re:For Thruly accessible webpages (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Bogtha (906264) on Thursday July 20 2006, @01:56PM (#15751738)

      The w3c check is not an acurate measure on how thruly accessible the pages are

      I now this because I have friends who are blind and frecuently use screen reader applications

      Yes and no. On the one hand, WCAG does have acknowledged shortcomings and it's certainly no guarantee. But aural browsers and screenreaders tend to be absolutely awful when it comes to supporting the markup that's intended to help them. They aren't designed to read accessible websites, they are designed to scrape as much meaning as they can out of inaccessible websites.

      So from a practical perspective, yes, you need to test in individual assistive user-agents if you want your website to be as usable as possible by disabled people. But when the markup is fine according to the W3C and assistive user-agents get it wrong, it's usually because the developers of the assistive user-agents haven't even heard of the W3C.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I wasn't aware websites were optimized for blind people.

      Many aren't at present, that's the whole point of making it easier to find those that are. Of course, making pages as device independent as practical helps many others as well as the blind.

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Shimdaddy (898354) on Thursday July 20 2006, @11:40AM (#15750764) Homepage
      Blind people can use screen readers, but if you bury your content in flash or in images without alt text, it makes it very difficult (impossible really) for the screen reader to know what to say. Also, if you position everything in tables and it loads in a weird order but looks right when it hits the screen, it presents problems, since the reader won't know that the <td> 5 rows down actually explains the <th> 3 columns over.

      CSS can help with this, as it keeps the formatting away from the content, but you still have to keep your .html (or .php or whatever) source files nice, clean and logical. A simple test is, if you can read your source file easily (ie in notepad or vi or whatever) then you're probably ok.
    • Well, I assume blind people use text-readers as one of their tools; So this pretty much would make any Flash-based site useless.
      I also think proper html-tags might help, so they can easily distinguish content from options/framework.
        • You're pathetic :) Have a good day.

        • Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Informative)

          by ajs (35943) <ajs&ajs,com> on Thursday July 20 2006, @12:57PM (#15751303) Homepage Journal
          Flash's accessibility features are not terribly helpful. They don't adhere to any standards, and require you to run particular software (they rely on Microsoft Active Accessibility, for example) to be compatible with them.

          No, before you go around spouting "STFU" at other folks, make sure you're able to back up your claims. Just becuase a company says "our stuff has accessibility features" doesn't mean they DO, or that they are useful to people who would need them.

          PS: I just tried to find out more about their accessibility features, but they use Flash to explain that, and I don't have sound on this machine... kind of useless.
          • But on the other hand, they do offer accessibility, and it does work. It might only work with a certain subset, and so on, but that has always been true of flash, so having it be true of flash accessibility is just not a serious issue. If you're willing to use flash, you've already made the statement that you're willing to exclude a certain percentage of users. Meanwhile, the accessibility flash provides is sufficient to fulfill the legal requirement (for those sites which are required to be accessible, tha

    • Re:Hmm... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by statusbar (314703) <jeffk@statusbar.com> on Thursday July 20 2006, @11:44AM (#15750791) Homepage Journal
      There has been standards for blind web browsing for many years! The problem is that hardly anyone use them, even a lot of government web sites which by law must be accessible.

      The amazing thing is that google, by page-ranking these pages higher, I believe it will do more to improve web accessibility than any law or standards organisation could.

      --jeffk++

      • Re:Hmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Dasaan (644170)
        Which raises an interesting point. What would happen if Google were to rank pages with valid html slightly higher that pages that don't validate properly?

      • The amazing thing is that google, by page-ranking these pages higher, I believe it will do more to improve web accessibility than any law or standards organisation could.

        Now if only they would do the same thing to down-list sites that are "Optimised for IE6" (or any other browser). The standards already exist, but for most content creators there is no incentive to follow them as long as the majority of their visitors are happy. Google is uniquely capable of reducing the number of visitors....

    • Perhaps you need to open your eyes then.

      A well designed standards based website is built in a uniform standard way and contains all the hints required for a screenreader to pickup on.
      Badly designed sites use lots of custom content and stupid user interface elements which make it difficult to access (both from a blind screen readers perspective and usually from a normal users view.

    • Re:Still missing the point. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by laffer1 (701823) <lukeNO@SPAMfoolishgames.com> on Thursday July 20 2006, @12:06PM (#15750973) Homepage
      It depends. If you actually talk to a blind person, tables aren't as annoying as people using characters between links. For instance, doing navigation with a pipe (vertical bar) or some other character sounds strange to them. I worked for someone who was blind and owned their own business for a time. He said cnet was one of the most annoying web properties for him to use. At the time their navigation sounded terrible and was quite randomly placed. He also didn't like navigation at the top as much except on the first page. Worst of all, he hated hearing. about us vertical bar products veritcal bar etc...

      Oh and he used Internet explorer. His software tied in with that so it looked like an ie hit and even tried to load all the crap everyone else deals with in IE. He did IE on windows using a dell.
      • huh, I never thought about how a blind person my be experiencing my pages... and I've almost always used vertical bars to separate navigation links! Even still my page seems to pop up earlier in the "Accessible" search, probably because it conforms to W3C strict.

        Anyone know of any resources for improving your sites for the visually impaired, or even some sort of tool that will let me experience my sites as a blind person would... it might help for some perspective.

        And here I thought I was getting the

      • For instance, doing navigation with a pipe (vertical bar) or some other character sounds strange to them.

        Which is why I use unordered lists for lists of links. Using CSS, you can just do this:

        #someId li { display: inline; }
        #someId::after { content: ' | '; }

        And if XHTML 2.0 ever gains traction, making navigational lists is as easy as:

        <nl>
        <li href='/some/link/'>Description of link</li>
        </nl>

    • Re:Still missing the point. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by IdahoEv (195056) on Thursday July 20 2006, @12:09PM (#15750998) Homepage
      Indeed. Point 5 of the guidelines:
      Tables should be used to mark up truly tabular information ("data tables"). Content developers should avoid using them to lay out pages ("layout tables"). Tables for any use also present special problems to users of screen readers (refer to checkpoint 10.3).

      Even Google's ultra-simple front page violates this guideline, despite zero need to do so.

      Point 3 of the guidelines says this:
      Mark up documents with the proper structural elements. Control presentation with style sheets rather than with presentation elements and attributes.

      But if you dig into the source of google.com, you see cruft like this:
      <br><font size=-1><font color=red>New!</font>
      Google fails rather dramatically to implement any web standard, not even including a doctype. These problems aren't limited to their front page, either. news.google.com is just as bad or worse.

      This is really a shame. The content that google presents is lightweight and free of the layout challenges that can sometimes make web standards difficult to follow: Google should be the perfect test case for perfect standards and accessibility. Instead, it's a throwback to 1996 web design. That they're launching a tool to test accessibility to the blind is incredibly ironic.

      • I found it amusing that the main page of the "accessible" search page uses:
        document.f.q.focus();
      • I'll take your word for it that this is the case, I have little experience with how it works, but it seems to me that they could make another goodle, like www.google.com/blind and in this there could be nothing which would impede blind users, so simply a search box at the top right (or where ever it would be best)... surely that would be a really helpful tool to go with this and take no effort at all. But I'm no expert so I might be missing something.
      • The reason is of course not that Google cannot make a page without the use of tables or the font tag, but that the pages work with even the oldest of browsers (except IE 2.0 which doesn't do tables). You can't DIV or CSS your way around that. Big sites like Google and Yahoo have always been breaking rules, either for speed (not using quotes etc.) or for backward compatability. W3C is nice but doesn't earn you money.
      • For a page like the google front page that gets maybe a billion hits a day I can completely understand ignoring a few standards to cut even 100 bytes off the total size of the page. That would reduce their traffic by 100GB/day.

    • Re:What? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by illuminix (456294) on Thursday July 20 2006, @12:25PM (#15751096) Homepage
      My son is blind. He uses the web with a reader, and loves google. He searches for music, among other things. It's pretty amazing how effecient he is with it, given he can't see. Some sites work better than others. It is possible to optimize a site for the blind. You're ignorant.

    • Re:What? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Arker (91948) on Thursday July 20 2006, @12:53PM (#15751273) Homepage Journal

      Optimizing websites for the blind is about as intelligent as optimizing music for the deaf...

      That's utter nonsense. First off, you think blind people can't process information? WTF?

      Second, it's not even about 'optimising for the blind' so much as simply 'using (rather than abusing) the web.' The web was designed from the start to deliver information in a neutral format so that the user-agent (browser) could then deliver that information appropriately. This may mean laying it out on a screen (of unknown dimensions and capability,) or it may mean speaking it aloud, or whatever. Proper web design is accessible to everyone. The errors that make sites inaccessible to the blind are the same errors that make them annoying and sometimes unusable to the rest of us as well.

      Keep in mind that you cannot dictate layout and use html properly and you'll have no problem. Ignore that fact and you shut out a lot of people, not just the blind.

      • Re:What? (Score:3, Informative)

        by Rifter13 (773076)
        When I worked for Albertsons.com, we accidently created a site that worked well for the blind, and even received some recognition for it. After the initial release of the site, and finding out how some blind people were using it, we actually had a lady talk to our develoment staff about optimizing the site even further, which we did.

        It is a VERY good feeling to have, when someone that is in their 40s tell you how grateful they are for your service, since it is the first time in her life, she was able to ac
    • Let's take a hypothetical situation. You live in a communist country (China), and are trying to do some research on a paper for your studies. You need to pull up some information on a completely legitimate topic (as per China's regulations). What would you use to find this information? Would you, as a Chinese person, whine and moan and boycott Google because they were censoring your results? Would you refuse to use them, because you know full well that if they didn't censor their results, there'd be no

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