Google Accessible Search for the Blind, Visually Impaired
Just Like we can Use “Google.com/ie” to Search Super Fast without Ads, Similarly Accessible Search is an early Google Labs product designed to identify and prioritize search results that are more easily usable by blind and visually impaired users. Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set.
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 pages that are likely to render well with images turned off. Google Accessible Search is built on Google Co-op’s technology, which improves search results based on specialized interests.
Accessible Search is a natural and important extension of Google’s overall mission to better organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible. Google Accessible Search is designed to help the visually impaired find the most relevant, useful and comprehensive information, as quickly as possible.
In the past, visually impaired Google users have often waded through a lot of inaccessible websites and pages to find the required information. Our goal is to provide a more useful and accessible web search experience for the blind and visually impaired.
Navigate search results quickly and easily, with just your keyboard. As you navigate, items are magnified for easier viewing. If you use a screen reader or talking browser, the relevant information is spoken automatically as you navigate.
T.V. Raman explains that Accessible Google Search makes visually handicapped users find first those web pages that they can easily listen to with a screen reader.
Current keyboard shortcuts include:
|
Key |
Action |
| j or DOWN | Selects the next item. |
| k or UP | Selects the previous item. |
| l or RIGHT | Moves to the next category (results, sponsored links, refinements). |
| h or LEFT | Moves to the previous category (results, sponsored links, refinements). |
| <Enter> | Opens the selected result. |
| / | Puts the cursor in the search box. |
| n | Moves to the next result, and fetches more results if necessary. |
| p | Moves to the previous result, reloading earlier results if necessary. |
| = | Magnifies current item |
| - | Shrinks current item |
| A | Switches to Accessible Search Results |
| W | Switches to regular Web Search Results |
For now, you need to use the Firefox 3 web browser with this experiment. This note will be updated as other browsers are added. Magnification already works with Google Chrome and Apple’s Safari.
Link : http://labs.google.com/accessible/
Also Read : Software that Writes What You Speak : Turn Voice into Text
5 Responses »
Rajesh Kanuri : This is some thing cool and you can always use the windows magnifier for this...
Debajyoti Das : I think you got this wrong..... This search is for those who are blind.... Its like an Audio Search ...for sites supporting Visual View for Blind using audio signals etc
forex robot : great post as usual .. thanks .. you just gave me a few more ideas to play with
M Jones : The searches are excellent, specially on a small handholder like mobile phone to access internet without all the unnecessary loaded pictures.
Gifts ideas : The internet provides a link with the world for blind and all other disable people, it is great to see that the biggest search engine like Google provides features to make the browsing easier.
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