[gui-talk] Fwd: Google Accessible Search

[Steve Pattison]

>To: VIP list vip-l at softspeak.com.au
>From: Jan Whitaker jwhit at melbpc.org.au
>
>Hi, vipsters. I pass messages of interest from you all to another 
>group. Here's my chance to return the favour. You probably all know 
>about this already, but thought for those who didn't, the 
>explanation was informative.
>
>Cheers,
>Jan
>
>Google Labs have introduced for test "Accessible Search" 
><http://labs.google.com/accessible/>. This is designed to find web 
>pages usable by blind and visually impaired users.
>
> From reading the FAQs <http://labs.google.com/accessible/faq.html> 
> it seems to do this using a subset of the usual tests performed to 
> check web pages for accessibility for the disabled:
>
>"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."
>
>As well as helping the "visually challenged", Google may help give 
>an incentive to web designers to make the web pages more readable generally.
>
>It is not just the blind who have to wade through a lot of visual 
>clutter and irrelevant information to get to what they want. When 
>advising organizations on the web site I am surprised how often they 
>have let irrelevant information, which might be called "window 
>dressing", impede the message they are trying to communicate.
>
>Google already provide a mobile web interface which attempts to 
>render web pages for users of smart phones and PDAs. Perhaps Google 
>can marry up the two efforts, as the W3C accessibility guidelines 
>are also intended to cover such devices.
>
>In addition the language used to write the text of a page could be 
>looked at. There is now a version of the WikiPedia using simplified 
>English, that is a subset of the English language intended to be 
>easier to read for non-native English speakers and for machine 
>translation: www.tomw.net.au/blog/2006/06/simple-english-wikipedia.html>.
>
>
>Jan Whitaker
>JLWhitaker Associates, Melbourne Victoria
>jwhit at janwhitaker.com
>business: http://www.janwhitaker.com
>personal: http://www.janwhitaker.com/personal/
>commentary: http://janwhitaker.com/jansblog/
>
>'Seed planting is often the most important step. Without the seed, 
>there is no plant.' - JW, April 2005
>_ __________________ _

Regards Steve
Email:  srp at internode.on.net
Skype:  steve1963
MSN Messenger:  internetuser383 at hotmail.com