After the misery of the tokenism I wrote about yesterday and the failures of RTE comes the delightful news that Google has once again come up with a valuable public service.
Fresh from Google Labs is a new accessible search engine that when searched will return websites that are more likely to be usable to screen readers than flash sites or heavily loaded image sites. This for me is a nice simple solution to the problem of making the Internet a resource for everyone (in the English speaking world at least). What is of interest is how this development came about. In August 2005 Google hired a certain Mr. T.V. Raman who was one of the first in Google with a strong knowledge of web accessibility. Now after developing this variant of the worlds most popular search engine it seems Google is embracing this area of the web and is hiring web developers with knowledge of W3C accessibility standards.
For me this is a major development since I was beginning to lose hope for an equal web. I say this because recently I was fortunate enough to be talking to Microsoft in the capacity as an Undergraduate representative. They were looking at selling their warez to students using a web interface. The offers they were pushing were excellent so I’m not knocking them on that BUT there was a slight downside to the meeting. As I often do I asked about what grade accessibility the site was rated at in terms of the internet standards set by W3C. A look of pure confusion and bafflement occurred next by the MS representative. I explained that Trinity has it’s own policy on all websites being rated at least to the AA standard. Again, what was this “AA standard” I was talking about, what had batteries got to do with a website. The next bit was the most humourous though, I was handed a business card and told to contact Microsoft and tell them how to make their website accessible. Ah… ha… Right-e-o then… Major multi-billion dollar global company was uneducated in Internet standards and were offering me a job in fixing their websites…
…and on that bomb-shell I’ll leave you, the reader, to digest that gem!