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.'"

TV Raman

[Anonymous Coward]

The article doesn't say this, but TV Raman is himself blind and author of emacspeak [sourceforge.net].

Previous /. discussion on Accessible Search

[xmas2003]

Original discussion [slashdot.org] for background on this followup.

Re:Visual CAPTCHAs in Google's own services

[roach2002]

Blogger has audio CAPTCHAs now. Check out my blog [blogger.com] for an example.

And they're doing it for accounts too: Check it out [google.com].

So yes, now they're doing audio CAPTCHAs.

Re:In related news

[hankwang]

ANY evidence whatsoever that MSN's search results are less accessible to the blind?

If I use Opera's "ignore author style" mode, it seems that the MSN search homepage is reasonably clean. It's just that the search box doesn't appear earlier than after about 8 pages of links for shopping, news, sports, money, and so on, even though in the formatted version, the search box is near the top of the page. Both in Yahoo Search and the standard Google search, the search box is quite close to the logical top of the page.

Re:In related news

[jlarocco]

What? MSN's search doesn't have anything on the page other than a search box. You do know you can just go to search.msn.com, right? In fact, in Opera, you can just add a new search using:

http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=%25s [msn.com]

And not even need to go there.

Also, if you add this to your user CSS:

div#ads_rightC {
display: none;
}
div#ads_topC {
display: none;
}

It will get rid of the ads in the search results.

Google's page doesn't even XHTML validate!

[rklrkl]

For what's supposed to be an "accessible" search engine page [google.com], Google have made pitiful efforts to even bother validating the XHTML (yes it has DOCTYPE of XHTML 1.0 Transitional). Check out the W3C's validation [w3.org] of it - 8 errors, including some outrageous typos like "bgtcolor" instead of "bgcolor" and no closing slashes (required for XHTML) in their <br> tags. I find it amazing that Google would tout such an search engine on its accessibility merits when it doesn't even validate due to blatant errors that are easily fixable.

Re:Accessibility is better than Flash

[jrockway]

> So Google Video and YouTube should stop using Flash to serve videos?

Yes, they should. Why should we be tied to one proprietary platform (flash) when there are plenty of lower-bandwidth, higher-quality, lower-priced solutions? Flash is kind of convenient, but not if it doesn't run on your platform or OS (Flash's license doesn't meet the DFSG guidelines, so I can't use it). I can't use YouTube at all as a result. At least Google lets me download the files in industry-standard formats that play easily on my system. (I would prefer that they use Ogg/Theora, but I'm willing to meet them half-way. Let me use my own video player, and I'm happy.)

As for flash in general, it's mostly a waste. Again, I'm willing to meet halfway if they used SVG + ECMAscript instead. Then I could actually watch it on my computer. (And a screenreader could easily get at whatever text was in the SVG -- it's just plain text after all -- so SVG+scripts is much more accessible than flash.)