Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 8:30 AM
Many people talk about the effect the Internet has on democratizing access to information, but as someone who has been visually impaired since my teenage years, I can certainly speak to the profound impact it has had on my life.
In everyday life, things like a sheet of paper—and anything written on it—are completely inaccessible to a blind or visually impaired user. But with the Internet a new world has opened up for me and so many others. Thanks to modern technology like screen readers, web pages, books, and web applications are now at our fingertips.
In order to help the visually impaired find the most relevant, useful information on the web, and as quickly as possible, we developed Accessible Search. Google Accessible Search identifies and prioritizes search results that are more easily used by blind and visually impaired users – that means pages that are clean and simple (think of the Google homepage!) and that can load without images.
Why should you take the time to make your site more accessible? In addition to the service you'll be doing for the visually-impaired community, accessible sites are more easily crawled, which is a first step in your site's ability to appear in search results.
So what can you do to make your sites more accessible? Well first of all, think simple. 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 that are likely to render well with images turned off. Flashing banners and dancing animals are probably the worst thing you could put on your site if you want its content to be read by an adaptive technology like a screen reader.
Here are some basic tips:
- Keep web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter and ensuring that the primary purpose of the web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.
- There are many organizations and online resources that offer website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for website owners and authors.
- As with regular search, the best thing you can do with respect to making your site rank highly is to create unique, compelling content. In fact, you can think of the Google crawler as the world's most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.
- It's also worth reviewing your content to see how accessible it is for other end users. For example, try browsing your site on a monochrome display or try using your site without a mouse. You may also consider your site's usability through a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone.
9 comments:
My motto is that I make website search engine compliant, and one of the aspects of optimizing that I focus on is simple design. Coming from a web design and development background helps me understand the structure and balance a site needs for all types of visitors. By keeping the design simple, then text can be read more easily by all browsers, operating systems and all types of monitor settings.
I have a few friends in wheelchairs and prosthetics and have watched them struggle in stores that are not accommodating, eventually leading to them not shopping there anymore.
A user that struggles with viewing the content on a website will do the same thing - go to the ones that do.
I hope that as the internet continues to grow that designers keep focusing on the accessibility of the content within the website rather than just beautiful design.
What a great post!
My first experience with user agents for the disabled was during the dot-com-boom in 2000. I was working at a vitamin and supplement e-commerce company, and we were one of the first to integrate screen reader software like JAWS into our Quality Assurance processes.
This was back in the early days of style sheets, and when tables were the industry standard for layout. Since tables are read by screen readers from left to right (the entire left column is read before any single word in the right column is read) we ended up having to re-layout our entire 5 step shopping cart process. In the end we found that conforming to this standard was not difficult at all, and in fact sped up the loading of our pages and increased their usability across the board, not just for the disabled.
The most important things to watch are your use of tables -- first, don't use them for layout -- second, make sure that if two things are related to each other that they are not separated by any sort of divisions. Say you're adding a label and its corresponding form element, then they should be in the same cell or DIV, with the label preceding the form element. If the label "First Name" is in a table's left column, and the form element "udfirstname" is in the right column, a blind person is not going to be able to logically determine which form element he's supposed to type his first name into.
Of course, today we use CSS and progressive enhancement to apply our layouts and organize our content. But understanding these few bits about screen readers and their limitations has helped keep me aware that there are all different types of users out there who surf the web in all sorts of different ways.
Take a minute and read just a few of the W3C's suggestions, and see if it doesn't change the way you think about your users and their individual needs.
Hey! What a great post! I worked a long time with a visually impaired woman. I know what you are speaking about. Now I feel really glad that my websites are not only easy and simple but also concentrated on the text, short and very genuine text :-). I would like to read more of you. I will come back here! Good work!
http://www.sikantis.net/blog
It's relatively rare to find Google posts link to W3C content. Google themselves often forget basic accessibility needs in some of their tools -- even when there would be little to no downside to implementing them (such as offering an anchor link within an iframe element when offering iframe code snippets for embedding... as such a link would make the embedding more accessible in non-iframe-supporting contexts). Google's homepage itself does a bad job when it comes to the W3C.
Important post indeed.
Though accessibility is primarily connected to standards and this is exactly way it's a shame Google doesn't even has a doctype declaration on it's homepage.
My business model is simple I just keep trying after all the account suspensions because making money online is nearly impossible now. Struggling with Low CPM's and Cheating stats that Kontera Generates I struggle and struggle but my name is always their glaring back at you from hundreds of scraper adsense sites saying " Pay Me " . Someone should be awarded for the time they spend trying to make money and failing at them all " With Traffic even " nothing fake and still failing. Wheres all the money that google gets from wealthy investment bankers and why dont they share? Instead of 1000 programs on the internet that " Don't work " why doesn't everyone get together and have one that works? Massive Layoffs now because the executives make so much money and the bloggers so little. The solution is not to aggrevate the webmaster by lying and saying everything is so simple when its so difficult beyond tears.
While I sit in my rural area where its impossible to get a 10 dollar a hour job now and the elite and wealthy fail to recognize my maximum effort for minimum reward working for nothing I tireless keep trying. Maybe that is what annoys google so much is I am always trying so hard and you know the program doesn't work. All the fake checks from shoemoney and all the fake fronts are too much to handle why not just reward us for our time properly?
The ones that deserve it. Not the bloggers that have no idea but the ones that have clawed and fought for every one of their tear felt links.
My motto is never work for nothing again and automate my work so that I don't waste so much time working for you guys for nothing.
ITs self defeating when you fail to send the check and ultimately just make me feel like garbage thinking about all the millions wasted on a program that doesn't work.
Hundreds of people employed making google apps , google earth , and getting paid to do things well that don't really help anyone other than google. Lets face it ultimately this is a free ride for some while burdening the economy for others.
Why donest google, yahoo, msn , work together on one program that rewards bloggers properly for their time and not working for hourse to make a " Minimum Payment " that always finds some reason " Not to pay out " .
33 million for google a year and 1 million for the NY times?
Well I am still wasting my time I guess
Please leave the light's out on the web site as it adds so much more to the home page,I have used google since it came on the web,and yes I tried them all, and none cane come to the same level of a search eng. . None can come close to you,so please leave the lights out on the home page.
one of the only things that seems to be universally accessible and acceptable is money. People in china may not fully understand english, but they will understand $$$ - KG from One Year Millionaire
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