30 November 2006

Making search accessible to visually impaired users

At the beginning of this year, Google, the world's leading search engine, launched an accessible search facility for visually impaired users. This was championed as a private project by Dr. T.V. Raman, an engineer at Google who recognised that as Google's features and services became more sophisticated, they became increasingly inaccessible to blind and visually impaired users.

The need for this research was triggered by Google's use of CAPTCHA, a security feature that obscures a word by twisting and changing background colour, which then needs to be typed in order to progress to a secured part of a site or search engine.

Many of Google's services use this security feature, including Gmail, Google Groups, Google Account or Blogger. Essentially, blind and visually impaired users were excluded from accessing any of these services, which infuriated many people, and online petitions gave Google a much-needed wake up call. Therefore Google added an audio function to its services, in order to open them up to many more users.

However, while this new audio component was welcomed by blind users, it was not accepted by the visually impaired, who often use different techniques or programmes to access content on the internet. For example, many visually impaired users enable a cookie which will store the required features, or use white and yellow writing on a black background, and these techniques are becoming increasingly important to accommodate a wider spectrum of users. But it's not only visually impaired users who face problems when accessing web pages. Some users may also rely on straightforward navigation and the absence of fast moving visuals, such as flash movies.

Therefore the issue is not accessibility but usability. Dr. T.V. Raman comments:

"I believe that websites 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."

When building websites, following these rules will enable better future access for visually impaired users, as well as people with other disabilities. But this will not happen overnight, and more research will be required in order to make web pages accessible to a wider range of people with special needs. Websites will have to adhere to strict semantic coding, the use of CSS for ordered navigation and have to comply with W3 standards.

For the moment, Google is continuing its research on this subject, in order to improve its services to visually impaired users.

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