Hello:
For those who asked about it -
Accessible Search FAQ
What is Google Accessible Search?
Accessible Search is an early Google Labs product designed to
identify and prioritize
search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually
impaired users.
Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is
most relevant to
your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping
you find the most
accessible pages in that result set.
How does Accessible Search work?
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. Google Accessible Search is built
on Google Co-op's
technology, which improves search results based on specialized
interests.
Why is Google offering this?
Accessible Search is a natural and important extension of
Google's overall mission
to better organize the world's information and make it
universally accessible. Google
Accessible Search is designed to help the visually impaired find
the most relevant,
useful and comprehensive information, as quickly as possible.
In the past, visually impaired Google users have often waded
through a lot of inaccessible
websites and pages to find the required information. Our goal is
to provide a more
useful and accessible web search experience for the blind and
visually impaired.
How do you decide which sites are "accessible" and which are not?
Broadly, Google defines accessible websites and pages as content
that the blind and
visually impaired can use and consume using standard online
technology, and we've
worked with a number of organizations to determine which websites
and pages meet
those criteria. Our methods for identifying accessible pages and
content are always
evolving; Currently we take into account several factors,
including a given page's
simplicity, how much visual imagery it carries and whether or not
its primary purpose
is immediately viable with keyboard navigation.
How can sites make their content more accessible to the blind?
Some of the basic recommendations on how to make a website more
usable 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. 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. Broad
adherence to these guidelines
is one way of ensuring that sites are universally accessible.
Does Accessible Search Filter Out Inaccessible Content?
No. First of all accessible
is a very subjective measure -- what's more, queries can vary
widely with respect
to how accessible the results are. As an example, if you are
looking for information
such as weather forecasts or reference material such as the
definition of an unfamili
term, the result set often consists of both accessible and
inaccessible content.
In these cases, Google Accessible Search promotes those results
that have been measured
to be more accessible. On the other hand, if the particular
query is about video
games, the chances are fairly high that a majority of the best
results for that query
will be visually busy pages. So in the final analysis, we
never
filter content in Google Accessible Search; we pick the best
results exactly as
we do with regular Google search, and then re-order the top
results by their level
of accessibility.
The Result Set Looks Identical To Regular Search?
The operational word in the above question is looks
. Google Accessible Search does not in any way change the look
and feel of Google
search results. What it does (see earlier question) is to
re-order results based
on how accessible they are.
Navigating Search Results
After Google Accessible Search was launched, many of our users
sent us feedback about
the results page (both Google Accessible and regular search)
being difficult to navigate
with screenreaders. In response, we have updated the results
page in both cases to
have section headers that can be used in conjunction with
screenreader hotkeys to
quickly skim through the page. Thus, once Google has responded
to your search query,
use your access technology's "move by section" keys to move
between the section that
displays
sponsored ads and the individual results.
How Can I Perform More Complex Searches?
Notice
has a link to Advanced Search
in addition to the simple text box. Use this link to access
Google Advanced Search
- this provides you the ability to focus your search on documents
in a specific language.
The resulting search will continue to use Google Accessible
Search for ordering the
results.
How Can I Compare Regular Search With Google Accessible?
Google Accessible Search is an experiment, and to be an effective
experiment, end-users
need to be able to easily compare the results obtained by using
regular Google search
vs Google Accessible. Notice that the top of the results page
contains a pair of
radio buttons labeled
Web Search and Accessible Search
you can easily repeat your search by pressing the appropriate
radio button and clicking
on the
submit button.
How Can I Make My Site Rank Higher?
And finally, for the ever popular question that everyone likes to
ask. As with regul
search, the best thing you can do with respect to making your
site rank highly is
to create good content. In fact you can think of GoogleBot as
the world's most influential
blind user -- the content that matters most to our indexing
technology -- good quality
text -- is what blind users hear when using spoken output. I
highly recommend
Google's Guidelines
for Webmasters as a starting point. Once you've ensured you've
fully addressed these,
I'd suggest reviewing your content to see how well it degrades
gracefully with respect
to end-user abilities. As a simple example, try the following
additional checks (in
addition to viewing the page in text-only mode as suggested by
the Google Webmaster
Guidelines):
Try browsing your site on a monochrome display
Try using your site without a mouse
How Can I Make Accessible Search My Default Home Page
Here is the short answer for IE and Firefox. Assuming that you
are on the Accessible
Search page, the following key sequence: Alt plus T,
O, Alt plus C, Enter should make that your default home page.
This sequence is the same
for both IE and Firefox.
Here is a more detailed explanation of what the above achieves.
On IE, go to Tools, Internet Options, and under the General tab
in the Home Page
ea, click the "Use Current" button. Note that the General tab is
the default tab
when Internet Options first comes up.
On Firefox, go to Tools, Options, and under the Main tab in the
Startup area, click
the "Use Current Pages" button. Note that the Main tab is the
default tab when Options
first comes up.
(c) Google .
About Google
JD Townsend
Helping the light dependent to see.
Daytona Beach, Florida, Earth
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