I’ve long had an interest in the impact of search results on learning. In our search-driven information world, the results for a search can have a significant impact on what people will learn. To that end, I did a search on “accessible web design,” to find out what the most available resources on the subject are right now. Today, I’m going to go through the first 10 search results of the moment with an eye to see just what Google thinks the most important and relevant results are for that search.

Why is this important? Simply because the route for learning about accessible web design is likely to begin with a search. The resources that turn up will guide the way people new to web accessibility shape their work.

Because Google’s personalized results can make this tricky, I did two independent searches — one in Chrome, where I was currenty logged into my own Google account — and one on Opera, with a freshly deleted browser history and with the parameter ‘pws=0′ appended to the search, to disable personalized search.

The results were almost identical; just a minor reordering which was very clearly influenced by my own browsing habits. This listing reflects the order of items in my Chrome search, with the position of the item in the Opera search in parentheses. These searches were performed on September 16th, 2012. Although the degree of change over 4 years suggests there won’t be a lot of change if you’re seeing this next week, it is nevertheless just a snapshot.

I also did this exact same search in 2008 — 4 years ago — so I’m also making notes here as to how this has changed over the last 4 years.

#1 (#1) Resources on Accessible Web Design

This is a great list of specific resources on building accessible web sites. Maintained by Terrill Thompson, who does a lot of great work in accessibility. It’s hard to tell for sure just how up to date the resources are, but I did verify that there were no broken links, so that’s a good sign. This is a great result for somebody looking for an introduction to accessible web design.

Position in 2008: #1

#2 (#2) World Wide Access: Accessible Web Design

Where the #1 result was a broad set of resources, this document is a concise discussion of what accessible web design is. While brief, it’s a great overview of the issues and basic solutions. It’s also from the same organization as result #1. This is also a great result – better for the rote beginner, in many ways.

Position in 2008: #2

#3 (#3) Accessibility – W3C – World Wide Web Consortium

I’m relieved to see this page showing up in the results. When I ran this check in 2008, the W3C was only represented by this business case document, which even then cited itself as incomplete. The W3C’s own statement on web accessibility is a must for these results.

Position in 2008: Not in first page of results

#4 (#5) GAWDS – The Guild of Accessible Web Designers

I have mixed feelings about the presence of GAWDS in these results. The organization hasn’t been significantly active for some time, and although it’s a great group (and I’m a member), I don’t really feel like it offers a lot in terms of up to date web accessibility information.

Position in 2008: Not in first page of results

#5 (#9) Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design

The first page seems like an improbable location for my own web site. Position 9 is certainly more appropriate than #5, but neither are particularly sane. As much as I like the idea of having my own site appear this high in the results (and suspect that there may be personalization going on here beyond what I can disable), I can’t help but think that this is not an appropriate result for this search.

Position in 2008: #10

#6 (#4) An Introduction to Accessible Web Design

Some good, some bad. The article is good in principle. It does, however, date to 2002 — which means that a significant amount of the article is referencing the WCAG version 1.0 and the Bobby accessibility testing service — which is long, long gone. This is a great example of an article that could be truly evergreen if it were updated. As it is, it’s kind of 50/50.

Position in 2008: #5

#7 (#6) WebAIM: WebAIM : Web Accessibility for Designers

These results would not be complete without a resource from WebAIM. This specific result is a bit of a surprise, from a content perspective, but I’m sure that the rampant sharing of infographics has given it a significant boost. It’s a good resource — it doesn’t stand on its own easily, since it’s quite cursory, but it gives great information. And unlike most of the other results — it’s actually about design and accessibility, rather than being more focused on development.

Position in 2008: did not appear in top 10

#8 (#7) Web Accessibility – ADA Guidelines for Web Page Design

My immediate reaction on seeing any about.com page in search results is rarely positive, and this article is no exception. It’s filled with positively ancient resources and a few just plain errors. The opening statement is “ADA Guidelines for the web cover aspects of Web accessibility” — giving a definite impression that the Americans with Disabilities Act actually provides guidelines for the web. Even if you’re considering the Section 508 guidelines, you have to observe that Section 508 is an amendment to the Workforce Rehabilitation Act of 1973, not the Americans with Disabilities Act. To be fair, not every resource in the list is actually terrible — but it doesn’t start out well. Not something that would be in my top 10 resources.

Position in 2008: did not appear in top 10

#9 (#8) Basics of Website design for accessibility

This is a bad article. It includes woefully inaccurate information, misconceptions, and ambiguous statements. One of the keystones of the page is an inaccessible Flash-driven accessibility tutorial. Oh, the irony.

Position in 2008: did not appear in top 10

#10 (#10) An Idiot’s Guide to Accessible Website Design

This is neither a particularly good article nor a particularly bad one. It’s vague, includes some misconceptions — but mostly it just isn’t very meaty. You can pick up a few good tips here, but you may also walk away with entirely incorrect perceptions including that WCAG 2.0 “eliminates” the guesswork in accessibility requirements. Sorry – but accessibility doesn’t summarize that neatly.

Position in 2008: did not appear in top 10

Overall Thoughts

The top results are a definite improvement on what they were in 2008. The appearance of the W3C’s main accessibility page is definitely a great addition. Unfortunately, there are also a few truly not-so-great or just inappropriate results. However, the top five or six results (excluding the fact that my web site rises significantly to the top when results are personalized to me) include some great resources — and the very first result can get you even further.

This was, of course, a pretty generic search — it’s about as broad as you can get, and is just one example of search results about web accessibility.

Search engines and humans are always looking for relevance. When we first open a document on the web (or in our mail), one of our first actions is frequently to determine whether this document is relevant to our needs. In the case of e-mail or physical mail, this is entirely a “push” experience — messages are sent to us, and we evaluate them for relevance. Spam survives largely on that obscure edge case where we identify their messages as relevant.

When it comes to web documents, the experience is more of an even exchange: we provide search engines with instructions about what we want to find and they send back a response which we both hope will meet our concept of relevance for the given instructions.

Sales and conversions are driven by relevance.

But humans and computers perceive information and relevance in very different ways. This is a challenge for search engines, which need to be tuned to fetch information which appears relevant to a human searcher on the basis of a computer’s understanding of the document. This is also a challenge for people with disabilities — while a person with a disability will generally have the human ability to perceive relevance, their perception of information on the web may be filtered through a computer. For a person who requires the use of a screen reader, this filtering amounts to receiving only the facets of information which are made available both by the author of the document and by the assistive technology they are using.

So, in any online search for information, a person with disabilities is encountering three primary barriers to finding relevant information:

• Did the author consider their needs when the document was created?
• Does their assistive technology offer the resources to transfer that information?
• Did the search engine return information which will be considered relevant to a human?

Everybody encounters the flaws in search engine results. Although searching is far more sophisticated than it was just a few years ago, it is still limited. (And appears to be getting more and more subject to the filter bubble effect — though that’s a different subject.)

Some words have multiple meanings, which are dependent on context. We all use context to guess these meanings: humans use tone of voice, facial gestures, body language, location, environment, and many other factors to assess what the probable meaning of a word may be. Search engines have limited access to this information — some information is mechanically detectable; such as location, and to some degree, environment. They know what words you used to search, and they may know what else you’ve recently searched for. They can use this information to try and better assess your intent and deliver the most relevant information to you.

When it comes down to what information is on a web document, search engines and screen readers have very similar information. As a result, search engines and users of screen readers have similar limitations in their ability to quickly identify relevance on those documents. In some ways, search engines have an advantage, since they can absorb all of the information on the page far more quickly than any human can.

Where a search engine might simply absorb an entire page and move on, humans scan. A visual user will quickly glance over the page, identifying images, headlines, navigation elements, and noticing a few key words along the way down the page. That quick scan of the page can frequently provide all the information the user needs to decide the document deserves another look, or is clearly irrelevant.

Users with disabilities also scan, when it’s an option. This is a place where the capabilities of assistive technology and the attentiveness of a web author really come into play.

For a screen reader user, it’s clear that there won’t be any quick scan of images. Although images may have supporting alt attributes, it wouldn’t be any real savings of effort to check. They can scan through descriptive link text, accessible navigation, and headings, however — if they’ve been provided in a useful fashion. Repetitive link text, headings replaced with images without alt attributes or an inaccessible font replacement method, any of the multitude of inaccessible navigation techniques: they may not prevent the user from getting at your content, but they will absolutely prevent the user from being able to get an overview of the content by scanning.

I mentioned above that search engines have some degree of advantage due to their speed of information absorption. The slower speed with which humans absorb information means that where a search engine might find great relevance caused by repetition of key phrases (or it might not — I would call that keyword stuffing, myself); a human will instead be overwhelmed by the same repetition.

This comes back to context. A human visitor to your web site doesn’t care at all how many times you’ve stated ‘blue widgets’, unless it’s less than once. From our perspective, if you said at the top of the page that you’re selling blue widgets, we understand that everything from that point on is in the context of a blue widget. If you actually say, over and over again, that we’re reading the blue widget specifications, and the pricing on blue widget shipping, and that your blue widget support is superlative — we’re just going to get overwhelmed. It’s unnecessary, and creates the sense of what I’m choosing to call “information blur” (the effect when information is lost due to excessive adjectival description).

What’s my point, again?

Relevance is a prime factor in converting a web visitor into a paying customer. However, humans and computers perceive relevance using very different factors. The best performing web site is going to be created according to the compromise rules which will provide the most relevant information to both humans and to search engines. Visitors with assistive technology, and particularly screen readers, are an interesting test case in this scenario, because the information they receive is filtered in a similar manner to that which a search engine will see.

Creating accessible content: it’s not just the right thing to do.

This is certainly a subject that I’ve covered before — in fact, it’s something I would hardly choose to cover yet again if it didn’t continue cropping up as an important issue. The use of text in alt attributes is an extremely sensitive subject.

Today, the good folks at SEOmoz published an extensive article documenting their statistical findings on web site ranking factors, as gathered from the data in their LinkScape analysis tool. It’s a good article, and demonstrates some interesting results they’ve garnered from the data available in the extensive LinkScape database.

One of their major takeaways in the article was a little disturbing to me.

“Alt attributes of images are probably pretty important places to use your keywords[.]” Explaining (Some of) Google’s Algorithm with Pretty Charts & Math Stuff, October 22nd, 2009

I’m not in anyway disputing their results; their data indicates that placing keywords in alt attributes is of benefit to search engine rankings. Whether that’s true or not is irrelevant to me; I simply want to discuss how this information should be best used.

SEOmoz, of course, is a company dedicated to the study and practice of search engine optimization and marketing. Their goal is to learn what they need to know in order to best put into practice the promotion of web sites. That’s great. My goal, however, is to make sure that users with disabilities are able to use and access web sites successfully without having to jump through unnecessary or unhelpful hoops along their way.

This is a particular case where the SEO method must be used cautiously and selectively if at all. What I want to convey in this article is the fact that while using keywords in alt attributes may help your web site rank, it can also result in a significantly less accessible web site, if applied poorly.

What’s the problem with alt attributes?

While sighted users will never even be aware of an alt attribute value in normal web browsing, screen reader users depend on them. Excess verbiage can render an image-based menu unusable, as I observed in a recent site review at Practical eCommerce. The same unnecessary use of keyword terminology in contextual images can easily confuse or distract a user; and the use of keywords with spacer or ornamental images can cause a web site to be completely unnavigable.

It’s all a question of information overload: practically speaking, if a web site uses images to convey information, a screen reader user can’t disable them without rendering the web site unusable. If the site also fills other images with extra text, the same user may be overwhelmed by an unnecessary volume of keyword phrases.

The SEOmoz report does continue to remark that “Keyword stuffing may be holding you back,” and the overuse of keywords in alt attributes can certainly qualify as keyword stuffing.

You shouldn’t take away from this article that using a keyword in an image alt attribute is totally unacceptable. That’s really not the case: just be selective. I wouldn’t condemn you for using the text “About ProductName” instead of “About” for a navigational image, or using a sensible alt attribute for a contextual image, such as “Woman using our ProductName.” Just remember that keyword stuffing is keyword stuffing, wherever you put the words.

And never place any value in the alt attribute for a purely decorational or spacing image. Please. Just an empty attribute.

A couple years ago, I wrote an article addressing the differences between working in a search engine friendly manner and working on search engine optimization. That article talked extensively about what is included in optimization which is not necessarily a part of being search engine friendly.

Shari Thurow, a well-respected researcher in the search engine optimization and usability realm, suggested that separating the two concepts is, in fact, ridiculous.

Well, that may be. However, I think that it’s crucial to break a task into parts if you want to gain a thorough understanding of the whole. Search engine marketing is an excellent example of a whole which is greater than the sum of it’s parts.

As I see it, building a search engine friendly site is one of the first stages of best practice search marketing. The adage “if you build it, they will come” fails to hold, however: a site which is constructed merely to be search engine friendly will gain little to no traffic.

Being part of the process

Being search engine friendly is a part of the process of search engine optimization; which is, itself, a part of the process of search engine marketing. In addition to these two aspects, search engine marketing may also include pay-per-click advertising, print advertising, link building and social media participation. Search engine marketing is a large area, and very, very few people are expert in all aspects. I’m certainly not.

From a marketing standpoint, what parts of this marketing whole are necessary for your business to succeed is going to vary radically depending on your industry and the way your business intersects with the internet. It will also depend on your definition of success. If you’re looking to maximize growth, you’ll probably want to be investing in all aspects of marketing.

So I’m arguing that search marketing, while clearly a practice in which the parts of the whole are highly interwoven and carry clear dependencies on each other, can nonetheless be separated into it’s component parts for a variety of reasons, including for the sake of discussion.

Now let me take this a step further. Not only is it possible to separate search engine marketing into separate aspects for discussion, it’s valuable.

If you want to understand the interactions between the different aspects of a task, it’s important to have some information about all parts. In this context, it’s necessary to treat the whole of search engine marketing in a given discussion. However, when you want to understand the details of a specific task, it’s important to stay focused on your part of that task.

It’s necessary for practitioners in search engine marketing to know, in general, what the impact their work will be on all aspects of the marketing campaign. It is crucial for practitioners in search marketing to know, in detail, exactly how to perform their own tasks in the best possible manner for their clients. It’s important to treat an area of expertise specifically. Talking through the nature of that area; comparing and contrasting it to other related areas; considering the specific nature of tasks within that area of expertise: these are all ways of better defining and refining knowledge on a specific subject.

Why does this matter?

It doesn’t, really. It’s all semantics. Search engine optimization is the commonly known term, and it frequently is understood to encapsulate search engine marketing. Or the other way around. The industries around search engines and marketing (and just about anything internet) are young, and the vocabularies aren’t really all the firmly established. As a result, some people have a very firm opinion of what a given term means which may not always coincide with others definitions.

Well, that’s why we write about it. We’re all hoping that our definitions will ultimately win.

There are numerous articles pointing out the business advantages of accessibility. Many of these reflect the similarity between accessibility and SEO. However, despite the close technical relationship between the needs of disabled users and the technical requirements of search engine optimization, the fact remains that the two goals are not the same, are not equivalent, and do not reflect the same ultimate goals.

At their hearts, web accessibility and SEO are focused on optimizing different aspects of your web site: accessibility cares almost exclusively about the disabled user and their experience whereas SEO is focused firmly on your bottom line and your experience, as site owner, in the online aspects of running your business.

Read more: Web Accessibility is not SEO

Perfecting a web site is a long and involved process. There’s no getting around the fact that if you want every aspect of your site to be right — accessibility, search optimization, and just all-around pizzazz, you’ve probably got some significant work to do. However, that’s not to say that there aren’t things you can check quickly and efficiently to make sure you’re not making some of the more egregious errors!

Here are 8 speedy checkups (in no particular order) which you can easily perform on your site to inspect it for problems. No methods suggested require special knowledge of HTML or web programming. Excluding acquiring and installing software, these tasks shouldn’t take more than a few minutes for most sites.

That doesn’t include fixing any problems found, of course…

Read more: Web site Tune-up: 8 Quick Checkups

This is just cool:

“Sitelinks” are additional links Google generates from the contents of a site in order to help users navigate your site — they provide these links in their search results for selected terms. Most sites don’t have site links, so I’m finding it pretty cool to notice them for myself!

If you can’t see the image, the current Sitelinks for this site are:

• Gallery
• Blog Home
• What is Web Accessibility
• SEO and Accessibility
• Articles

On the whole, I’m pretty pleased with the selection chosen here. They’ve pretty well pinned down the key areas of the site: web design, web accessibility, search marketing, and my writing on these topics. Everything is reasonably represented. Perhaps, in my forthcoming site redesign (don’t keep a look out; it’s not going to be that soon,) I’ll make a point to better promote these specific areas of the site.