Joe Dolson: Accessible Web Design

Yesterday, I installed a great little plugin which tracks my top 10 viewed posts. Unsurprisingly, this gives me a greater sense of what posts people are visiting as well as providing a means for other people to see my more popular writings.

But it came with some surprises…

Currently, and by a HUGE margin, my most popular post is a post announcing Jim Byrne’s latest book. It’s a nothing post: a paragraph saying who Jim Byrne is (founder of GAWDS, a brief sentence saying something nice about the book, and a link to the book’s sale page on LuLu.com.

And yet, it was visited 100 times in the last 24 hours. I’d known that this page received an unusually high amount of traffic; but this is well beyond what I expected.

And, of course, now that it’s in my top 10 (really, top 5 - I edited the plugin), it’s creating a bit of a feedback loop: curious people will continue to visit it to try and see what’s so special.

My assumption is that most of these visitors are looking for review information: advice about the book, etc. So I’ve added to the post. Hopefully, I’ll be giving these visitors what they’re looking for: I didn’t expand the article into a huge review — it’s not a huge book, after all! But it’s a more meaningful article now than it was before.

It’s a good thing, knowing what pages people most frequently visit on your site. Those are good pages to pay close attention to: if they aren’t already, change them to try and deliver what your visitors are looking for.

Well, I’m back from my travels (more on that later), and I’d say that what seems the most interesting to me in the mountains of documents metaphorically sitting in my inbox is the introduction of Google’s Accessible Web Search.

The idea is absolutely valuable, in my mind. Like other indexes of accessible web sites, it gives the impaired user the ability to search knowing that what they find will also be something that they can actually use. However, having a brilliant idea doesn’t necessarily make the product all that great.

I’m certainly not the first to comment on this, but the several others who have had comments to make have generally agreed that the realization is flawed. First of all, there’s Google’s standard non-standards-based web design. Sure, it’s a very simple page, and there’s not much there to confuse the visitor. I can accept that. This isn’t necessarily a page where they precision of the code makes that much difference. However, it’s also worthwhile to look at the effort which would be required to make the page accessible. A reasonably competent standards based designer should be able to convert this page into strict HTML with CSS design with no more than a commitment of a few hours. Can Google not spare a few hours to take care of this? Perhaps Google is over-committed to their new development to spare the time to actually perfect anything older…

If Google would just take the time to make it’s search interface accessible and standards-based it would allow this accessible search to make a much greater impact. If, in addition to that, Google would spend the time to make ALL of it’s interfaces accessible, I would consider that one of the best things since sliced bread. It’s a tiny little piece of development in comparison to the complexity of many of Google’s projects - just make those search interfaces and results pages accessible. So simple, and so needed.

A second problem is in the project tagline: "Accessible Web Search for the Visually Impaired ". There’s a big problem right there - is Google ignoring all other modes of accessibility? I understand that it’s rather a difficult prospect to identify whether a site is accessible to individuals with motor control problems or with dyslexia - but I would appreciate an acknowledgement that accessibility on the web is far more than just sites for people visual impairments.

I’m left wondering exactly how Google identifies accessible sites. In the FAQ is the statement:

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. […] Currently we take into account several factors, including a given page’s simplicity, how much visual imagery it carries and whether or not its primary purpose is immediately viable with keyboard navigation.

OK. Well, I’m not one-hundred percent sure what this means - can Google determine the difference between images which are accompanied by good Alt text and bad? Can they determine when images are necessary to the meaning of a page or not? This sounds much like complex pages with numerous images are candidates to immediate exclusion - but what is complexity? The visual layout can be very complex and yet contain an incredibly simple underlying structure in accessible design. It all depends on how the site has been designed to degrade or be user controlled.

I’m not expecting Google to come up with an algorithm which can definitively decide whether a page is accessible. The top experts in the field don’t always agree when it comes to a personal review of a site - it’s unreasonable to expect a search algorithm to do better. I would merely like greater transparency about the issues that Google is looking at to decide accessibility.

I applaud Google for the concept and the principles behind the Accessible Web Search, and wish them the best in making it a real, practical, and valuable resource for impaired populations. I also implore them to take their ideals to the next step and embrace web standards and accessibility in their own development and interfaces.

Related Link: Free People Search PeekYou allows you to find people online - 100% Free

Looking over my site statistics the today I noticed a few referrals from a site called Search and Go. Having never heard of the site, I figured I’d check it out and see what was up. Well, turns out it’s a project which is still in beta development which intends to provide a comprehensive information portal including articles, news, a directory, and various other tools.

One of the key aspects for Search and Go (as one might conclude from the title) is that it’s intended to be fully accessible by mobile internet devices, and also has a featured directory section of sites tailored for mobile devices.

Looking at their code, I’m pretty happy - they are using very clean, semantically appropriate design. Since it’s still in beta, and the front page is clearly labeled as a work in progress, I’m not going to go out of my way to criticize the site’s layout, although I’d suggest making their navigational skip links a little more transparent. That is, possible to be made visible. There’s a very interesting article on the subject of skip links by Gez Lemon and Mike Cherim available at Accessites.org which is worth looking at on this subject.

As for my own site, I was thrilled to see it organized under the category Internet > Web Accessibility > Accessible Designers. The sheer novelty of the existence of this category is worth noting, since many directory sites take so little effort to consider accessibility as to lack a category for it entirely.

Good luck, Search and Go!

Related Link: 220-603 220-603 Certification Practice Exam Test Questions

I just became aware today, through the Guild of Accessible Web Designers newsletter, of an internet directory featuring exclusively accessible web sites. This is a great way to make the accessible web more usable for individuals with disabilities - although it has its limitations.

My first reaction, of course, is that in an ideal world, this would actually be equivalent to the Open Directory Project - because, of course, eventually all sites will be accessible! But, of course, for now, this is a very meaningful directory purely because there is such a paucity of meaningfully accessible web sites.

The only thing which will make this directory truly useful, however, will be to really start filling it up with great sites. I intend to submit my own accessible sites to the directory to maximize the potential of the site.

Directories are difficult beasts - they’re huge, unwieldy, and frequently just not used that much - search is much easier. However, developing a means to specifically search for accessible sites has a target audience which can really benefit from the difference, so I hope that this directory can take off.

Limitations to the Net Guide

I said limitations, and I did mean it. The directory itself has imperfect accessibility. The search results page itself failes to validate - a minor flaw, but it’s lacking a required attribute on a Javascript block. In addition, there is no <noscript></noscript> tag set to provide information for users without Javascript support. Is this Javascript critical to the functioning of the site? No. In fact, it seems like it’s not even being used in the page - but regardless, for an accessible directory I’d have higher standards.

The design of the site is literally LITTERED with empty table cells. This is, sad to say, a classic example of a highly complex and screen reader-unfriendly table-based layout.

Many links provide only a moderate background color change to indicate that they are active; no links have a useful indication for their :active or :focus states, which is necessary for keyboard navigators to easily locate their cursor.

All in all, the site has great potential; but has not yet realized that potential. I can see that they have a good aim in mind, and I fully support that ideal - but I also hope that they are working hard to improve the usability and accessibility of their own site in order to set a positive example.

It’s rare that I find a topic which makes me blog on both this blog and my SEO Blog, but here we are. On May 8th, I posted about Sphere, a new tool focused on searching blogs. In that post, I was thinking generally about the concept of blog search and how it can effectively apply to local search. In the course of my brief research, I noticed that the design for Sphere had been done by Adaptive Path.

Although Adaptive Path is not explicitly a design agency focused on accessibility, they are sometimes considered to be at the cutting edge of usability, standards based design, and have certainly had some impact on the world of accessibility. So, when I noticed that they’d designed this new tool, I thought I’d take a look under the hood and see what they’d done. Also, of course, I read their own article about the design process.

In general, it’s pretty good. But there are a number of very basic accessibility features which are just flat out lacking - and which would have been very simple to incorporate. This is really kind of disappointing.

I started out with the very basic tack of doing some automated testing. As much as automated testing is imperfect, it does provide a great starting ground. Running Sphere’s results page through Cynthia Says, an online test for compliance with the Section 508 standards. Compared to the full WCAG 1.0, Section 508 standards are simple to match.

The site only failed on one point. But it was, frankly, a big one. The big input for the search field is unlabeled. It has no indicator anywhere what purpose it actually serves. To a sighted user, this is obvious - but if you were navigating blind, you would need to continue past the input form to the search button in order to know what should be entered there. However, having arrived at this button, you still wouldn’t know for certain that it referred to the previous input. Without an explicit labeling convention, it would still be quite possible for there to be another input field which was actually attached to the search button.

The second test was to validate the site. Again, the home page came up just a little short. Rather than a nice clean "this is valid XHTML transitional" message, I got a number of errors. They’re all minor errors, and probably won’t have any great impact on accessibility. There were a large number of unescaped ampersands, one invalid attribute ("valign") and a mistakenly capitalized anchor tag. Not terrible, but still disappointing.

Finally, the eyeball test at the front page. Again, not quite perfect. Sphere has this very cool feature, the "SphereIt" bookmarklet, which is advertised at the bottom of the page. The anchor text for information about the bookmarklet is the famous "Click Here". Fine for a sighted user, lousy for a screen reader.

This is just a very brief look over the site; but on the whole I’m a little disappointed. There are just a few things here which are lacking, but they’re all such easy fixes. Hopefully, I’ll check again in a few weeks and find these mistakes all cleared up - it is a brand new site, after all.

 Tags:

• blogging
• accessibility reviews
• sphere

Other Websites: Blog Search - Leverage the clustered meta search power of Widow.com to search multiple blog search engines. Refine your search with one click based on context.

Recently I’ve begun to support an SEO company by writing for their search engine industry blog. This is a big change for me, since SEO never used to be an industry I was involved in. However, having control over the content of the blog makes a big difference. I’ve been able to write about topics of interest and concern to me, as long as they pertain in some way to the search engine industry.

As it happens, the last few weeks have been quite interesting in regards to the search engine industry with Google’s heavily publicized and criticized entrance into the Chinese market. This particular event resulted in an invitation from the US Congressional Human Rights Caucus concerning Google’s censorship of search results. Google’s official statement on the issue is well worth reading.

Edit: As of Monday, February 27, 2006 I am no longer providing support for this company. I will be continuing to blog on SEO issues at Inter:digital Strategies