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<\/p>\nSaturday, March 15, 2008<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n Many people talk about the effect the Internet has on democratizing access to information, but as
\n someone who has been visually impaired since my teenage years, I can certainly speak to the
\n profound impact it has had on my life.\n<\/p>\n
\n In everyday life, things like a sheet of paper\u2014and anything written on it\u2014are completely
\n inaccessible to a blind or visually impaired user. But with the Internet a new world has opened up
\n for me and so many others. Thanks to modern technology like screen readers, web pages, books, and
\n web applications are now at our fingertips.\n<\/p>\n
\n In order to help the visually impaired find the most relevant, useful information on the web, and \n Why should you take the time to make your site more \n So what can you do to make your sites more accessible? Well first of all, think simple. In its \n Here are some basic tips:\n<\/p>\n \n Fellow webmasters, thanks for taking the time to better understand principles of accessibility.
\n as quickly as possible, we developed
\n Accessible Search<\/a>. Google
\n Accessible Search identifies and prioritizes search results that are more easily used by blind and
\n visually impaired users—that means pages that are clean and simple (think of the Google
\n home page!) and that can load without images.\n<\/p>\n
\n accessible<\/a>? In
\n addition to the service you’ll be doing for the visually-impaired community, accessible sites are
\n more easily crawled, which is a first step in your site’s ability to appear in search results.\n<\/p>\n
\n current version, Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML
\n markup found on a web page. It tends to favor pages that degrade gracefully: pages with few visual
\n distractions and that are likely to render well with images turned off. Flashing banners and
\n dancing animals are probably the worst thing you could put on your site if you want its content to
\n be read by an adaptive technology like a screen reader.\n<\/p>\n\n
\n the web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.\n <\/li>\n
\n on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C
\n publishes numerous guidelines including
\n Web Content Access Guidelines<\/a>
\n that are helpful for website owners and authors.\n <\/li>\n
\n is to create unique, compelling content. In fact, you can think of the Google crawler as the
\n world’s most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the
\n content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.\n <\/li>\n
\n example, try browsing your site on a monochrome display or try using your site without a mouse.
\n You may also consider your site’s usability through a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone.\n <\/li>\n<\/ol>\n
\n In my next post I’ll talk about how to make sure that critical site features, like site
\n navigation, are accessible. Until then!\n<\/p>\n