Sometimes a person can’t see the forest for the trees. If you’re a sight-impaired Web surfer using a text reader, sometimes you can’t hear the content for the code. Google research Scientist T.V. Raman has developed a solution, and has put it into search.
Raman, who himself is blind, is working out the bugs to Google Accessible Search, a project born of Google labs and Google’s Co-op technology, which tailors search results to special interests.
Google Accessible Search limits search results to pages that have simple layouts with few visual distractions. This is important, Raman tells us, because devices that convert Web text to speech for the visually impaired become bogged down on “visually busy” pages. Sifting through those pages to find the desired content, then, can be difficult and time-consuming.
“In its current version,” writes Raman, “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.”
Raman is an accomplished Google employeewell, if you’d call writing 3 books, filing 25 patents, and authoring and defining several widely used interfaces and scripting languages “accomplished.” I have my sight and still screwed up making my coffee this morning.
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