Raman on Google's Accessible Web Search 13 Dec 2006

Web Accessibility Blog interviews T.V. Raman - the man behind Google's Accessible Web Search.

It's particularly interesting to hear Raman's thoughts on how the tool has been received by different communities:

"So far, its reception has been very positive. There's been some criticism in the blogosphere saying 'this isn't needed, sites should just follow access standards' but end-users who are struggling with the mess we have on the Web today definitely appear to find this a useful tool and that's our goal".

It seems that some visually-impaired users think the tool doesn't go far enough however:

"Our intention for this Google Labs experiment was to see if we could reorder results based on accessibility. It seems that many [visually-impaired] users just saw the name 'Accessible Search' - and then went to the results page expecting an entirely different layout of results. When they didn't see something entirely different, then went away thinking 'it just looks the same.'"

Related: The definition of "accessoogle".