20 July 06
Google Labs new Accessible Search, released today, could cause long-lasting damage to the web accessibility scene.
As any good accessibility expert will tell you, accessibility isn’t polar. Sites do not fall into two categories – accessible and non-accessible. It’s a wide range with an assortment of pitfalls. Accessibility is also something that cannot be fully tested by machine, experts and users are needed to evaluate how well a site performs.
Google’s new tool is used to root out sites which don’t perform well in accessibility terms.
Google Accessible Search looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a web page. It tends to favo[u]r pages that degrade gracefully
Google defines accessible websites and pages as content that the blind and visually challenged can use and consume using standard online technology
These statements are already true with the vanilla search engine, as degradable sites perform well due to SEO anyway. Sites that work well without stylesheets and/or images tend to fair better in search results.
However, web authors whose pages appear in the Accessible Search maybe lulled into a false sense of security, believing they don’t need to improve their site’s accessibility as it appears on the results.
For example, sites with table layout and flash content still unfortunately appear. Owners of these sites could claim these sites are ‘accessible’ – even though they aren’t very accessible at all. This totally undermines the whole accessibility movement.
You would also think being Google – one of the world’s largest internet companies – would be setting an example when building an accessible search engine. The home page features 8 validation errors, font tags and inline styling. The results page is worse with 169 validation errors, deprecated tags aplenty, table layouts, no doctype, badly formed tags and attributes. For an accessible search engine, this is not only terrible, but setting a dire example.
It’s nice to see people at Google care about accessibility, and yes, it is a lab project, but when it’s released to the public as shoddily as this, people are going to believe accessibility is easy. It’s not. Accessibility is hard and takes a lot of work to be done well.
Not only are Google setting a bad example, they’re encouraging site owners to be satisfied with their sites accessibility and undermining web accessibility and web standards groups.
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Comment by Chris on 20 July 2006, 21:30
The way I see it, its Google’s standard search with a few extra variables which determine the ordering of – namely the usage of certain markup elements. Now your never going to get a one-to-one relationship between HTML code and page accessibility, but you can get a general feel – with refinement it can be improved, but you will still get some in-accessible sites which Google incorrectly label as accessible.
This search is good for getting an idea as to how your site performs in both the accessibility stakes and semantically, however its not gospel. Its certainly not claiming to be akin to the DDA/WAI/508 validation services that exist.
Of course, in thinking this way we are ignoring the designers intent – its not meant as a Web developers tool, but rather as a tool for the Web user, and that is where it is making a difference, over and above the results returned from a standard search.
I’m sure I had more to say but its 5.30 and I need a beer!