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.'"

Re:In related news

[Utopia]

Here is a stupid fact:
Search for 'Search' on the goog lab's accessible search page.
MSN.com is listed as the first.

Does that make MSN.com the most accessible compliant search page?
I know/read that MSN.com has the highest complaince for CSS and HTML compared to the other portal pages.
But accessible I think not.

Re:Visual CAPTCHAs in Google's own services

[0racle]

They're also not following W3C standards for accessibility. Google can currently do no wrong, even when they do exactly what others would be blasted for as being wrong.

Good that they are not following WCAG...

[baboonlogic]

WCAG 2.0 is really crappy. Its a standard that hardly achieves any real accessibility. Here is a really good rant on WCAG 2.0 - To hell with WCAG 2.0 [alistapart.com]. Its about the only thing that it seems w3c has got terribly worng.

Re:W3C

[richdun]

Wow, I never ran Google.com through the validator. That's pretty small stuff they're tripping on too - no DTD, no quotes around most attributes, etc. I love that in the Maps API (and other places) they recommend strongly that you use XHTML Strict 1.0 (which I do anyway), but they don't even put a DTD in their main page.

Amnesty international, not so good press

[Spliffster]

Google, Yahoo and Microsoft were acused by Amnesty international [google.ch] were accused to "beeing evil".

a couple of days later google releases an accessible search which seems to be rushed out badly (their code doesn't validate to basic HTML standards, let alon WAI and other compatibilities which would really help disabled people).

just a coincidence ? I think not.

They have managed to avoid bad press in the tech world.