Google site to aid the blind

Google was set to unveil a Web search site on Thursday designed to help blind people find results that will work best with their text-to-speech software.

The new Google Accessible Search site, which will be available at labs.google.com/accessible early on Thursday, prioritizes the list of search results based on how simple the Web page layouts are, said T.V. Raman, research scientist in charge of the service.

For example, a user searching for "weather" will find pages with a lot of other content on them.

"To a user who can see, that might be fine," Raman said. "But if you are listening to the page (via screen reader software), a lot of information can prevent you from finding what you are looking for."

The service, which Raman characterized as an "early-stage experiment" out of Google Labs, looks at a number of signals by examining the HTML markup found on a Web page. It tends to favor pages that have few visual distractions and that are likely to render well with images turned off.

Google Accessible Search is built on the same technology underlying Google Co-op, which prioritizes search results based on specialized interests.

Raman said he built the service "for purely selfish reasons" after joining Google about a year ago. Google hopes user feedback will help it improve the service.

David Faucheux, a blind man who uses Google and writer of the Blind Chance audio blog, said Web search for people who can't see sorely needs improvement. "I hope they can make things easy to use," he wrote in an e-mail. "I do a Google search and usually after the first several hits, I don't continue to look for anything."

[coryschulz]

EXCELLENT!!!

Maybe I can use this service and get web pages that have less ads. That would be sweet.

[debH]

Google searches using speech is great

Yes using Google to do web searches for topics of interest is the way to go for people with visual difficulties.
I use a software program from talkingdesktop.com that lets me do Google news searches using speech recognition and my headset.

[ChazzMatt]

ONE page per article, please!

maybe it will also cause publications to put the entire article on ONE page only. i hate having to click on page 2, 3, 4 to keep reading.

The first thing I do is look for the "print friendly" link on page. Not only does it have less ads - it's simpler, easier to read and it's all on one page! I use the "printe friendly" links to read all my online information when possible. This would also help blind people with their software -- so maybe this will become the norm.

[chazzsubscribe]

some like it simpler! ONE page per article, please!

I hate cluttered pages and articles broken up into several pages. Maybe it will also cause publications to put the entire article on ONE page only. i hate having to click on page 2, 3, 4 to keep reading.

The first thing I do is look for the "print friendly" link on page. Not only does it have less ads - it's simpler, easier to read and it's all on one page! I use the "printe friendly" links to read all my online information when possible. This would also help blind people with their software -- so maybe this will become the norm.