Webmaster Central Blog
Official news on crawling and indexing sites for the Google index
Tips for making information universally accessible
Saturday, March 15, 2008
Written by
T.V. Raman
, Research Scientist
Many people talk about the effect the Internet has on democratizing access to information, but as someone who has been visually impaired since my teenage years, I can certainly speak to the profound impact it has had on my life.
In everyday life, things like a sheet of paper—and anything written on it—are completely inaccessible to a blind or visually impaired user. But with the Internet a new world has opened up for me and so many others. Thanks to modern technology like screen readers, web pages, books, and web applications are now at our fingertips.
In order to help the visually impaired find the most relevant, useful information on the web, and as quickly as possible, we developed
Accessible Search
. Google Accessible Search identifies and prioritizes search results that are more easily used by blind and visually impaired users – that means pages that are clean and simple (think of the Google homepage!) and that can load without images.
Why should you take the time to make your site more
accessible
? In addition to the service you'll be doing for the visually-impaired community, accessible sites are more easily crawled, which is a first step in your site's ability to appear in search results.
So what can you do to make your sites more accessible? Well first of all, think simple. In its current version, 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: pages with few visual distractions and that are likely to render well with images turned off. Flashing banners and dancing animals are probably the worst thing you could put on your site if you want its content to be read by an adaptive technology like a screen reader.
Here are some basic tips:
Keep web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter and ensuring that the primary purpose of the web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.
There are many organizations and online resources that offer website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including
Web Content Access Guidelines
that are helpful for website owners and authors.
As with regular search, the best thing you can do with respect to making your site rank highly is to create unique, compelling content. In fact, you can think of the Google crawler as the world's most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.
It's also worth reviewing your content to see how accessible it is for other end users. For example, try browsing your site on a monochrome display or try using your site without a mouse. You may also consider your site's usability through a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone.
Fellow webmasters, thanks for taking the time to better understand principles of accessibility. In my next post I'll talk about how to make sure that critical site features, like site navigation, are accessible. Until then!
Hey! Rankings in mobile search results changed
April 21st, 2015
.
Check here if your site is mobile-friendly.
Labels
accessibility
10
advanced
193
AMP
2
API
2
apps
6
autocomplete
2
beginner
171
crawling and indexing
141
encryption
1
events
44
feedback and communication
74
general tips
81
geotargeting
1
Google+
1
hacked sites
8
hreflang
3
https
2
images
6
intermediate
204
interstitials
1
localization
21
malware
3
mobile
41
mobile-friendly
5
performance
11
products and services
57
search console
9
search queries
4
search results
105
security
5
sitemaps
43
structured data
11
TLDs
1
url removals
1
UX
1
verification
7
video
1
webmaster community
5
webmaster guidelines
44
webmaster tools
159
Archive
2016
Aug
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Jan
2015
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2014
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2013
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2012
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2011
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2010
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2009
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2008
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2007
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Jul
Jun
May
Apr
Mar
Feb
Jan
2006
Dec
Nov
Oct
Sep
Aug
Feed
Google
on
Follow @googlewmc
Give us feedback in our
Product Forums
.
Subscribe via email
Enter your email address:
Delivered by
FeedBurner
Hey! Rankings in mobile search results changed April 21st, 2015.
