Google’s accessibility search…
I’ve picked up on a couple of articles this week discussing Google Labs ‘Accessible Search’. Bill Slawski posted this earlier in the week on SEO by the SEA and The Register have also posted this today covering the specialist Google search.
The search tool, developed by blind Google employee TV Raman, claims to only return results for websites that are fully accessible to blind people (or more accurately, screen reading software) and biases the ranking in favour of more accessible sites. This in theory means that blind audiences need not waste their time clicking on links that take them into completely inaccessible parts of the internet such as this and this.
Anyone into their on-page optimisation will probably already know that accessible websites go hand in hand with websites that perform well naturally in search result rankings, but this tool goes one further by excluding results that don’t comply to accessible standards.
Its good to see a big company like Google actively promoting web standards in this way and can only help in convincing business owners and webmasters that spending time on standards compliant development is in no way wasted cash.
Syndication
