Tips for making information universally accessible

Saturday, March 15, 2008

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
home page!) 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Fellow webmasters, thanks for taking the time to better understand principles of accessibility.
In my next post I’ll talk about how to make sure that critical site features, like site
navigation, are accessible. Until then!

Written by
T.V. Raman,
Research Scientist