Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Tips for making information universally accessible

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

Accessible Searchaccessible

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.