Official Google Blog: Finding easy-to-read web content
Like most of you, when I search the web, I want to find relevant information with a minimal amount of distraction. But because I can’t see and I use a device that converts web text to speech, I’m even more in tune with the distractions that can sometimes get in the way of finding the right results. If the information I’m after is on a visually busy page, I have to sort through that page to find the text I want–an extra step that can sometimes be very time-consuming.
That’s why I’ve been passionate about a project I’m working on at Google called Google Accessible Search. Accessible Search adds a small twist to the familiar Google search: In addition to finding the most relevant results as measured by Google’s search algorithms, it further sorts results based on the simplicity of their page layouts. (Simplicity, of course, is subjective in this context.) When users search from the http://labs.google.com/accessible site, they’ll receive results that are prioritized based on their usability.
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–that is, 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.
This is still an early-stage experiment, and we hope to improve the product’s quality over the next few months based on user feedback. Check it out over on our Labs page and tell us what you think.
I technically blind with my glasses off… a source of much humor with my son and wife. So between that fact and my design background I’ve often worked to have an accessible site. In fact that’s one of the reasons I added WAP accessibility to the blog. I was surfing my site via my cell phone and there where a few too many links for my liking.
Well in looking at what Google has done I see they agreed with me somewhat. I tried a couple search phrases I know would have me ont eh first page of the results and I actually moved up in a couple cases… the sites missing as far as I could tell used a lot of flash and javascript respectfully.
Tags: Design, Google, Interesting, Search
Leave a Reply