Web Site Accessibility Blog

This is part one of an interview series that I had performed this fall while researching for an article. The article ended up being much too large for publication, so I have decided to publish the interviews and the full text of the article here at Accessibility Blog.

Part one is the interview with T.V. Raman, who was instrumental in creating the Accessible Search interface at Google.

How was the idea for the accessible search received?

Working on Accessible Search has been a very positive experience for everyone involved. From the start, within Google, the idea of Accessible Search was received as a useful tool and an important first step. Interestingly, although there was a lot of feedback from the accessibility community as to how Google could improve accessibility to some of our services, the actual idea of Accessible Search as a tool to help find accessible content wasn’t necessarily on top of anyone’s list. However, from our perspective, we thought that offering new search functionality built on what we already have in place, was the fastest and best route to helping users discover pages that would be most useful to them.

I think our instinct was right because Accessible Search has been a very positive experience from the start and continues to be so. That goes from building it to seeing the initial positive reaction from the user community and continuing to improve the product to date. I hope that as we continue to improve Accessible Search, we’ll have a long-term positive impact on increasing awareness of the need to create clean, accessible Web content.

It seems as though you are taking into account some of the elements of standards-based programming in the algorithm. Are standards anything of concern at Google? Do you find that sites written according to W3C standards are more relevant in general?

For accessibility, clean, well-structured semantic markup is the best thing you could hope to have. The three key phrases “clean” “well-structured” and “semantic” are all important in the above. Adherence to specs definitely makes checking easier. However, I do not believe that passing a checker that validates ones markup for structure is a sufficient condition to verify accessibility. I can easily create XHTML documents that will pass every static checker but may potentially end up not being accessible, i.e. any one measure is very easy to game. That being said, I believe that Web sites creating clean, well-formed XHTML content will, over time, find it significantly easier to serve all their users better — simply because their content will be easier to manage and evolve.

Do you have ways of distinguishing appropriate and inappropriate ALT attributes?

Google scores ALT attributes appropriately, and things like stuffing a 14-page essay into an ALT tag won’t help you rank better and will annoy your users. We encourage users to use ALT and TITLE tags in the best way for users, and that work well for Google as well.”

In general, what issues does Google believe it can authoritatively decide are “accessible” - given that only the validation of code and absence of deprecated features can be fully tested automatically?

I believe our “abilities” in the above are likely to be a moving target. I think of it as being analogous to our ability to detecting email spam. Also, keep in mind that we’re still soliciting feedback from the user community and evolving it further, which is why it was launched in Google Labs.

How has the accessible search been received by blind users?

So far, its reception has been very positive. There’s been some criticism in the blogosphere saying “this isn’t needed, sites should just follow access standards” but end-users who are struggling with the mess we have on the Web today definitely appear to find this a useful tool and that’s our goal.

Is Google working with the blind community to make them aware of the Accessible Search?

We’ve announced it on many of the blindness related lists and have spent time briefing some of the journalists that cover this topic. In general, the blind/visually impaired user community in the U.S. is very well connected, in that users become aware of services fairly quickly. If it’s useful, word gets around quickly. We’ve relied on word-of-mouth, just like we do for so many of our product launches, which is a testament to our usability.

Many low-vision users weren’t impressed, as the tagline said for the visually impaired, but wasn’t any better than the usual search. Are there plans to expand the accessible search for all vision types?

Let’s separate the tagline from actual user experience. We got a lot of flak from different users just on word choice e.g. “visually impaired” vs. “visually disabled” vs. “visually challenged” vs. …and, personally, I believe it’s impossible to come up with a catch phrase that covers everyone, makes everyone happy and at the same time conveys the entire gamut of the user population and the exact meaning of the product.

As for search results with Accessible Search, our intention for this Google Labs experiment was to see if we could reorder results based on accessibility. It seems that many users just saw the name “Accessible Search” — and then went to the results page expecting an entirely different layout of results. When they didn’t see something entirely different, then went away thinking it saying “it just looks the same.”

Since more than one person had this experience, our take away is that we need to get better at communicating what Accessible Search is really all about. We get better when we know what works for the user and welcome user feedback on everything from improving taglines to adding new features.

Are there more plans for Google to become more accessible?

Building Accessible Search is a good first step in delivering the most accessible information online and we hope to continue developing ways that Google can be more accessible.

Are you working on additional accessibility projects?

While we don’t talk about specific products before they launch, I’ve been thinking about a few projects in this area.

Can you give us a little history about yourself?

Absoutely. http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman