Greater accessibility for Google Apps

It's been a year since we posted about enhanced accessibility in Google Docs, Sites and Calendar. As we close out another summer, we want to update our users on some of the new features and improvements in our products since then. We know that assistive technologies for the web are still evolving, and we're committed to moving the state of accessibility forward in our applications.

Since last year, we've made a number of accessibility fixes in Google Calendar, including improved focus handling, keyboard access, and navigation. In Google Drive, we incorporated Optical Character Recognition technology to allow screen readers to read text in scanned PDFs and images, and we added NVDA support for screen readers. New accessibility features in mobile apps (Gmail for Mobile and Google Drive on iOS and Android) included enhanced explore-by-touch capabilities and keyboard/trackpad navigability. For a full list of new features and improvements for accessibility in our products, check out our post today on accessible@googlegroups.com.

Based on these updates, we’ve also created an Administrator Guide to Accessibility that explains best practices for deploying Google Apps to support users’ accessibility needs. We want to give everyone a great experience with Google Apps, and this guide is another resource designed with that goal in mind.

For more information on these specific accessibility improvements, using Google products with screen readers, how to submit feedback and how to track our progress, please visit www.google.com/accessibility.

Posted by Jeff Harris, Product Manager

A look inside our 2011 diversity report

We work hard to ensure that our commitment to diversity is built into everything we do—from hiring our employees and building our company culture to running our business and developing our products, tools and services. To recap our diversity efforts in 2011, a year in which we partnered with and donated $19 million to more than 150 organizations working on advancing diversity, we created the 2011 Global Diversity & Talent Inclusion Report. Below are some highlights.

In the U.S., fewer and fewer students are graduating with computer science degrees each year, and enrollment rates are even lower for women and underrepresented groups. It’s important to grow a diverse talent pool and help develop the technologists of tomorrow who will be integral to the success of the technology industry. Here are a few of the things we did last year aimed at this goal in the U.S. and around the world:

• We held our third annual HBCU (Historically Black Colleges and Universities) Faculty Summit at Google New York, hosting 50 professors and administrators from 16 HBCUs, who came together to collaborate, share insights and engage with Googlers.
• We helped 100,000 students and faculty at 22 HBCUs in the U.S. “go Google;” they now use Google Apps for Education.
• To date, 3,000 students in 77 countries have received Google scholarships and we also expanded our scholarship programs for women in technology.
• We piloted the Top Black Talent U.K. program to help the U.K.’s top black engineering and business students transition into the tech industry. We also partnered with the African Caribbean Society to offer 100 students workshops and mentoring with Googlers from engineering, sales and marketing.

We not only promoted diversity and inclusion outside of Google, but within Google as well.

• We had more than 10,000 members participate in one of our 18 Global Employee Resource Groups (ERGs). Membership and reach expanded as Women@Google held the first ever Women’s Summit in both Mountain View, Calif. and Japan; the Black Googler Network (BGN) made their fourth visit to New Orleans, La., contributing 360 volunteer hours in just two days; and the Google Veterans Network partnered with GoogleServe, resulting in 250 Googlers working on nine Veteran-related projects from San Francisco to London.
• Googlers in more than 50 offices participated in the Sum of Google, a celebration about diversity and inclusion, in their respective offices around the globe.
• We sponsored 464 events in 70 countries to celebrate the anniversary of International Women's Day. Google.org collaborated with Women for Women International to launch the “Join me on the Bridge” campaign. Represented in 20 languages, the campaign invited people to celebrate by joining each other on bridges around the world—either physically or virtually—to show their support.

Since our early days, it’s been important to make our tools and services accessible and useful to a global array of businesses and user communities. Last year:

• We introduced ChromeVox, a screen reader for Google Chrome, which helps people with vision impairment navigate websites. It's easy to learn and free to install as a Chrome Extension.
• We grew Accelerate with Google to make Google’s tools, information and services more accessible and useful to underrepresented communities and diverse business partners.
• On Veterans Day in the U.S., we launched a new platform for military veterans and their families. The Google for Veterans and Families website helps veterans and their families stay connected through products like Google+, YouTube and Google Earth.

We invite you to take a look back with us at our 2011 diversity and inclusion highlights. We’re proud of the work we’ve done so far, but also recognize that there’s much more to do to. These advances may not happen at Internet speed, but through our collective commitment and involvement, we can be a catalyst for change.

Posted by Yolanda Mangolini, Director, Global Diversity & Inclusion/Talent & Outreach Programs

Introducing Google Drive... yes, really

Just like the Loch Ness Monster, you may have heard the rumors about Google Drive. It turns out, one of the two actually does exist.

Today, we’re introducing Google Drive—a place where you can create, share, collaborate, and keep all of your stuff. Whether you’re working with a friend on a joint research project, planning a wedding with your fiancé or tracking a budget with roommates, you can do it in Drive. You can upload and access all of your files, including videos, photos, Google Docs, PDFs and beyond.

With Google Drive, you can:

• Create and collaborate. Google Docs is built right into Google Drive, so you can work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Once you choose to share content with others, you can add and reply to comments on anything (PDF, image, video file, etc.) and receive notifications when other people comment on shared items.
• Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices. You can install Drive on your Mac or PC and can download the Drive app to your Android phone or tablet. We’re also working hard on a Drive app for your iOS devices. And regardless of platform, blind users can access Drive with a screen reader.
• Search everything. Search by keyword and filter by file type, owner and more. Drive can even recognize text in scanned documents using Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology. Let’s say you upload a scanned image of an old newspaper clipping. You can search for a word from the text of the actual article. We also use image recognition so that if you drag and drop photos from your Grand Canyon trip into Drive, you can later search for [grand canyon] and photos of its gorges should pop up. This technology is still in its early stages, and we expect it to get better over time.

You can get started with 5GB of storage for free—that’s enough to store the high-res photos of your trip to the Mt. Everest, scanned copies of your grandparents’ love letters or a career’s worth of business proposals, and still have space for the novel you’re working on. You can choose to upgrade to 25GB for $2.49/month, 100GB for $4.99/month or even 1TB for $49.99/month. When you upgrade to a paid account, your Gmail account storage will also expand to 25GB.



Drive is built to work seamlessly with your overall Google experience. You can attach photos from Drive to posts in Google+, and soon you’ll be able to attach stuff from Drive directly to emails in Gmail. Drive is also an open platform, so we’re working with many third-party developers so you can do things like send faxes, edit videos and create website mockups directly from Drive. To install these apps, visit the Chrome Web Store—and look out for even more useful apps in the future.

This is just the beginning for Google Drive; there’s a lot more to come.

Get started with Drive today at drive.google.com/start—and keep looking for Nessie...

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome & Apps

Learning independence with Google Search features

Searches can become stories. Some are inspiring, some change the way we see the world and some just put a smile on our face. This is a story of how people can use Google to do something extraordinary. If you have a story, share it. - Ed.

We all have memories of the great teachers who shaped our childhood. They found ways to make the lightbulb go off in our heads, instilled in us a passion for learning and helped us realize our potential. The very best teachers were creative with the tools at their disposal, whether it was teaching the fundamentals of addition with Cheerios or the properties of carbon dioxide with baking soda and vinegar. As the Internet has developed, so too have the resources available for teachers to educate their students.

One teacher who has taken advantage of the web as an educational tool is Cheryl Oakes, a resource room teacher in Wells, Maine. She’s also been able to tailor the vast resources available on the web to each student’s ability. This approach has proven invaluable for Cheryl’s students, in particular 16-year-old Morgan, whose learning disability makes it daunting to sort through search results to find those webpages that she can comfortably read. Cheryl taught Morgan how to use the Search by Reading Level feature on Google Search, which enables Morgan to focus only on those results that are most understandable to her. To address the difficulty Morgan faces with typing, Cheryl introduced her to Voice Search, so Morgan can speak her queries into the computer. Morgan is succeeding in high school, and just registered to take her first college course this summer.



There’s a practically limitless amount of information available on the web, and with search features, you can find the content that is most meaningful for you. For more information, visit google.com/insidesearch/features.html.

Posted by Glen Shires, Speech Technology

Understanding accessibility at CSUN 2012

This week we’re attending the 27th annual CSUN International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference. As the Internet evolves, screen readers, browsers and other tools for accessibility need to grow to meet the complexity of the modern web. Conferences like CSUN are an opportunity to check in with web users with disabilities: not just to share our progress in making online technologies accessible, but to also discuss improvements for the future.

Who are these users? In August, we conducted a survey with the American Council of the Blind, to find out more about how people with sight impairment use the web. We received nearly 1,000 responses from people who are blind or visually impaired, from a wide range of professions in 57 countries: teachers, software developers, social workers, writers, psychologists, musicians and students. The results paint a picture of why it is critical to improve the accessibility of web applications. Of the respondents:

• Almost 90 percent reported regularly using the web to keep in touch with friends and family
• Over half use a smartphone, and over half own more than one computer
• Over two-thirds of respondents said they use social media
• Over 50 percent have completed a baccalaureate degree, and of those, 30 percent have gone on to to postgraduate studies at the masters' or Ph.D. level
• Of those who are currently students, over 70 percent have their assistive technology provided for by their school
• However, for those who have left school and are of working age, 46 percent are unemployed

Better web accessibility has the potential to increase educational and employment opportunities, provide social cohesion and enable independence for the people with disabilities. We imagine a future for the web where the most visually complex applications can be rendered flawlessly to screen readers and other assistive devices that don't rely on sight, using technologies that work seamlessly on browsers and smartphones.


[click here for audio description]

Since we last attended CSUN, we’ve made several improvements to the accessibility of our products:

• ChromeVox (in beta) provides a screen reader that's built for the web, right inside Chrome.
• We've improved accessibility for Google Docs, Sites and Calendar, including keyboard shortcuts and better support in modern screen readers
• Android 4.0 introduces touch exploration and out-of-box accessibility activation
• We've also expanded caption support on YouTube—improving access to broadcast and direct-to-web videos for people who are deaf or hard of hearing

If you're attending CSUN 2012, we hope you'll come up and say hello at one of our talks on the accessibility of our products, including the use of video in Google+ and Docs and accessibility on Android devices. And Friday we’ll host a Q&A Fireside chat with Google product teams. You can also try some of these improvements out at our two hands-on demo sessions on Thursday, in the Connaught breakout room:

• 10am to 12pm—Chromebooks and new features in Google Apps
• 1pm to 3pm—Android 4.0 Galaxy Nexus phones

If you're not attending CSUN 2012, we'd love to hear your thoughts on accessibility in our web forum.

Posted by Naomi Black, Engineering Program Manager, Google Accessibility

Enhanced accessibility in Docs, Sites and Calendar

This fall, as classrooms fill with the hustle and bustle of a new semester, more students than ever will use Google Apps to take quizzes, write essays and talk to classmates. Yet blind students (like blind people of all ages) face a unique set of challenges on the web. Members of the blind community rely on screen readers to tell them verbally what appears on the screen. They also use keyboard shortcuts to do things that would otherwise be accomplished with a mouse, such as opening a file or highlighting text.

Over the past few months, we’ve worked closely with advocacy organizations for the blind to improve our products with more accessibility enhancements. While our work isn’t done, we’ve now significantly improved keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers in several Google applications, including Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. Business, government and education customers can also learn more about these updates on the Enterprise blog.

In the weeks and months ahead, we’ll continue to improve our products for blind users. We believe that people who depend on assistive technologies deserve as rich and as productive an experience on the web as sighted users, and we’re working to help that become a reality.

For more information on these accessibility changes, using Google products with screen readers, how to send us feedback and how to track our progress, visit google.com/accessibility.

Posted by T.V. Raman, Technical Lead, Google Accessibility

An accessibility survey for blind users

These days, we rely on the Internet to keep us informed and in touch, yet our experience of the web is filtered through the tools we use to access it. The devices and technologies we choose, and our decisions about when we upgrade those tools, can affect how we interact with the web and with whom we are able to communicate.



In July, I attended the annual conference held by the American Council of the Blind (ACB). I was struck by something I heard from people there: their experience using the web was very different from mine not because they were blind, but because the technology and web tools available to them were unlike the ones available to me, as a sighted person. While the Internet provides many benefits to modern society, it has also created a unique set of challenges for blind and low-vision users who rely on assistive technologies to use the web. We’re committed to making Google’s products more accessible, and we believe the best way to understand the accessibility needs of our users is to listen to them.



This week, we’re announcing a survey that will help us better understand computer usage and assistive technology patterns in the blind community. Over the past three months, we’ve worked closely with the ACB to develop a survey that would give us a greater understanding of how people choose and learn about the assistive technologies they use. This survey will help us design products and tools that interact more effectively with assistive technologies currently available to the blind community, as well as improve our ability to educate users about new features in our own assistive technologies, such as ChromeVox and TalkBack.



The survey will be available through mid-September on the ACB's website and by phone. We encourage anyone with a visual impairment who relies on assistive technologies to participate; your input will help us offer products that can better suit your needs. For details, visit www.acb.org/googlesurvey.



Posted by Naomi Black, Accessibility Engineering Team

Supporting accessibility at CSUN

This week we’ll be at the 26th annual CSUN International Technology & Persons with Disabilities Conference to talk with users and accessibility experts about how to make our products more accessible to people with disabilities. We’ll also give a talk on the current state of accessibility for our products.

We’ve been working in this space for a while, launching features such as captions on YouTube, applications such as WalkyTalky and Intersection Explorer on Android (so people can use Google Maps eyes-free) and building easy-to-navigate, accessible Google search pages to work smoothly with adaptive technologies.

We have more to do. At CSUN 2011, we’re looking forward to more insights about how to make Android, Chrome and Google Apps better enabled for people who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers. If you’re attending and are interested in participating in our focus groups there, please fill out our survey by 9pm PST today, Tuesday, March 15.

To see an overview of the accessibility features of our products today, visit google.com/accessibility. We're launching an updated version of this site later today to make it easier for visitors to find information on using our products, and for developers and publishers to learn how to develop accessible products on our platforms. While you’re there, please give us feedback on what we can do better to make our products more accessible.

Posted by Naomi Black, Engineering Program Manager for Accessibility

Honoring the 20th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act

[Cross-posted on Google Public Policy Blog] 

Bending, walking, breathing, hearing, seeing and sleeping are simple things that are often taken for granted, as are thinking, learning, and communicating.

Twenty years ago today, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was signed into law. This milestone legislation bans persons or companies from discriminating against anyone with limited abilities. It’s hard to imagine a world in which the right to participate in activities commonly enjoyed by the bulk of the population are denied or inadequately accommodated, but that was the case before ADA.

The efforts of the advocates who came to Washington two decades ago to rally for their civil rights has transformed so much of the modern world around us. As someone who’s worn hearing aids since I was 13, for example, I very much appreciate that most television programs and DVDs or Blu-Ray disks are captioned. On my way home, I might pass through a door that I know is wide enough for a wheelchair -- because the ADA set the building codes that require it. I see service animals on the DC Metro, accessible checkout aisles at my grocery store, ramps on sidewalks, and designated parking in movie theater lots: all there because of the important provisions included in the ADA.

Whereas the ADA set legal standards for ensuring equal rights for Americans with disabilities, Google is keenly aware that technology can help all users better enjoy the world around them. From opening millions of titles of printed content to persons with visual impairments through Google Book Search, to providing ready and easy-to-use captions on YouTube, to including a built-in screenreader and text-to-speech engine in Android, to introducing new extensions on Chrome to make online text easier to read, we’re serious about honoring our mission to make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. You can keep up with our progress at google.com/accessibility.

Congratulations to all those who work to make the ADA a living, breathing reality. For all the years I’ve been working on policy in Washington, it’s still rare to see a law that has had as positive and fundamental an influence on our lives as this Act. There still is work to be done to meet the goals of ADA, and we are committed to doing our part.

Posted by Vint Cerf, Chief Internet Evangelist

Video Tutorial: Google for Webmasters

We're always looking for new ways to help educate our fellow webmasters. While you may already be familiar with Webmaster Tools, Webmaster Help Discussion Groups, this blog, and our Help Center, we've added another tutorial to help you understand how Google works. Hence we've made this video of a soon-to-come presentation titled "Google for Webmasters." This video will introduce how Google discovers, crawls, indexes your site's pages, and how Google displays them in search results. It also touches lightly upon challenges webmasters and search engines face, such as duplicate content, and the effective indexing of Flash and AJAX content. Lastly, it also talks about the benefits of offerings Webmaster Central and other useful Google products.


Take a look for yourself.

Discoverability:



Accessibility - Crawling and Indexing:


Ranking:


Webmaster Central Overview:


Other Resources:



Google Presentations Version:
http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dc5x7mrn_245gf8kjwfx

Important links from this presentation as they chronologically appear in the video:
Add your URL to Google
Help Center: Sitemaps
Sitemaps.org
Robots.txt
Meta tags
Best uses of Flash
Best uses of Ajax
Duplicate content
Google's Technology
Google's History
PigeonRank
Help Center: Link Schemes
Help Center: Cloaking
Webmaster Guidelines
Webmaster Central
Google Analytics
Google Website Optimizer
Google Trends
Google Reader
Google Alerts
More Google Products


Special thanks to Wysz, Chark, and Alissa for the voices.

Written by Evan Tang, Search Quality

Design patterns for accessible, crawlable and indexable content

Written by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

As a follow-up to my previous posts on accessibility, here are some design recommendations for creating web content that remains usable by the widest possible audience while helping ensure that the content gets indexed and crawled.

Avoid spurious XMLHttpRequests

Pages that enable users to look up information often use XMLHttpRequests to populate the page with additional information after the page has loaded. When using this pattern, ensure that your initial page has useful information on it -- otherwise Googlebot as well as those users who have disabled scripting in their browser may believe that your site contains only the message "loading..."

CSS sprites and navigation links

Having meaningful text to go with navigational links is equally important for Googlebot as well as users who cannot perceive the meaning of an image. While designing the look and feel of navigational links on your site, you may have chosen to go with images that function as links, e.g., by placing <img> tags within <a> elements. That design enables you to place the descriptive text as an alt attribute on the <img> tag.

But what if you've switched to using CSS sprites to optimize page loading? It's still possible to include that all-important descriptive text when applying CSS sprites; for a possible solution, see how the Google logo and the various nav-links at the bottom of the Google Results page are coded. In brief, we placed the descriptive text right under the CSS-sprited image.

Google search results with CSS enabled


Google search result with CSS disabled ("Google" sprited image lost, descriptive "Google" link remains)


Use unobtrusive JavaScript

We've talked about the concept of progressive enhancement when creating a rich, interactive site. As you add features, also use unobtrusive JavaScript techniques for creating JavaScript-powered web pages that degrade gracefully. These techniques ensure that your content remains accessible by the widest possible user base without the need to sacrifice the more interactive features of Web 2.0 applications.

Make printer-friendly versions easily available

Web sites with highly interactive visual designs often provide all of the content for a given story as a printer-friendly version. Generated from the same content as the interactive version, these are an excellent source of high-quality content for both the Googlebot as well as visually impaired users unable to experience all of the interactive features of a web site. But all too often, these printer-friendly versions remain hidden behind scripted links of the form:

<a href="#" onclick="javascript:print(...)">Print</a>

Creating actual URLs for these printer-friendly versions and linking to them via plain HTML anchors will vastly improve the quality of content that gets crawled.

<a href="http://example.com/page1-printer-friendly.html" target="_blank">Print</a>

If you're especially worried about duplicate content from the interactive and printer-friendly version, then you may want to pick a preferred version of the content and submit a Sitemap containing the preferred URL as well as try to internally link to this version. This can help Google disambiguate if we see pieces of the article show up on different URLs.

Create URLs for your useful content

As a webmaster, you have the power to mint URLs for all of the useful content that you are publishing. Exercising this power is what makes the web spin. Creating URLs for every valuable nugget you publish, and linking to them via plain old HTML hyperlinks will ensure that:

• Googlebot learns about that content,
• users can find that content,
• and users can bookmark it for returning later.

Failure to do this often forces your users to have to remember complex click trails to reach that nugget of information they know they previously viewed on your site.

Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites

Written by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

Hubbell and I enjoying the day at our home in California. Please feel free to view my earlier post about accessibility for webmasters, as well as additional articles I've written for the Official Google blog.

One of the most frequently asked questions about Accessible Search is: What can I do to make my site rank well on Accessible Search? At the same time, webmasters often ask a similar but broader question: What can I do to rank high on Google Search?

Well I'm pleased to tell you that you can kill two birds with one stone: critical site features such as site navigation can be created to work for all users, including our own Googlebot. Below are a few tips for you to consider.

Ensure that all critical content is reachable

To access content, it needs to be reachable. Users and web crawlers reach content by navigating through hyperlinks, so as a critical first step, ensure that all content on your site is reachable via plain HTML hyperlinks, and avoid hiding critical portions of your site behind technologies such as JavaScript or Flash.

Plain hyperlinks are hyperlinks created via an HTML anchor element <a>. Next, ensure that the target of all hyperlinks i.e. <a> elements are real URLs, rather than using an empty hyperlink while deferring hyperlink behavior to an onclick handler.

In short, avoid hyperlinks of the form:
<a href="#" onclick="javascript:void(...)">Product Catalog</a>

In preference of simpler links, such as:
<a href="http://www.example.com/product-catalog.html">Product Catalog</a>

Ensure that content is readable

To be useful, content needs to be readable by everyone. Ensure that all important content on your site is present within the text of HTML documents. Content needs to be available without needing to evaluate scripts on a page. Content hidden behind Flash animations or text generated within the browser by executable JavaScript remains opaque to the Googlebot, as well as to most blind users.

Ensure that content is available in reading order

Having discovered and arrived at your readable content, a user needs to be able to follow the content you've put together in its logical reading order. If you are using a complex, multi-column layout for most of the content on your site, you might wish to step back and analyze how you are achieving the desired effect. For example, using deeply-nested HTML tables makes it difficult to link together related pieces of text in a logical manner.

The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized <div> elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result.

Supplement all visual content--don't be afraid of redundancy!

Making information accessible to all does not mean that you need to 'dumb down' your site to simple text. Making your content maximally redundant is critical in ensuring that your content is maximally useful to everyone. Here are a few simple tips:

• Ensure that content communicated via images is available when those images are missing. This goes further than adding appropriate alt attributes to relevant images. Ensure that the text surrounding the image does an adequate job of setting the context for why the image is being used, as well as detailing the conclusions you expect a person seeing the image to draw. In short, if you want to make sure everyone knows it's a picture of a bridge, wrap that text around the image.


• Add relevant summaries and captions to tables so that the reader can gain a high-level appreciation for the information being conveyed before delving into the details contained within.


• Accompany visual animations such as data displays with a detailed textual summary.

Following these simple tips greatly increases the quality of your landing pages for everyone. As a positive side-effect, you'll most likely discover that your site gets better indexed!

Tips for making information universally accessible

Written by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

Many people talk about the effect the Internet has on democratizing access to information, but as someone who has been visually impaired since my teenage years, I can certainly speak to the profound impact it has had on my life.

In everyday life, things like a sheet of paper—and anything written on it—are completely inaccessible to a blind or visually impaired user. But with the Internet a new world has opened up for me and so many others. Thanks to modern technology like screen readers, web pages, books, and web applications are now at our fingertips.

In order to help the visually impaired find the most relevant, useful information on the web, and as quickly as possible, we developed Accessible Search. Google Accessible Search identifies and prioritizes search results that are more easily used by blind and visually impaired users – that means pages that are clean and simple (think of the Google homepage!) and that can load without images.

Why should you take the time to make your site more accessible? In addition to the service you'll be doing for the visually-impaired community, accessible sites are more easily crawled, which is a first step in your site's ability to appear in search results.

So what can you do to make your sites more accessible? Well first of all, think simple. In its current version, 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 that are likely to render well with images turned off. Flashing banners and dancing animals are probably the worst thing you could put on your site if you want its content to be read by an adaptive technology like a screen reader.

Here are some basic tips:

1. Keep web pages easy to read, avoiding visual clutter and ensuring that the primary purpose of the web page is immediately accessible with full keyboard navigation.


2. There are many organizations and online resources that offer website owners and authors guidance on how to make websites and pages more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. The W3C publishes numerous guidelines including Web Content Access Guidelines that are helpful for website owners and authors.


3. As with regular search, the best thing you can do with respect to making your site rank highly is to create unique, compelling content. In fact, you can think of the Google crawler as the world's most influential blind user. The content that matters most to the Googlebot is the content that matters most to the blind user: good, quality text.


4. It's also worth reviewing your content to see how accessible it is for other end users. For example, try browsing your site on a monochrome display or try using your site without a mouse. You may also consider your site's usability through a mobile device like a Blackberry or iPhone.

Fellow webmasters, thanks for taking the time to better understand principles of accessibility. In my next post I'll talk about how to make sure that critical site features, like site navigation, are accessible. Until then!

Using ALT attributes smartly

Written by Ríona MacNamara, Webmaster Tools Team

Here's the second of our video blog posts. Matt Cutts, the head of Google's webspam team, provides some useful tips on how to optimize the images you include on your site, and how simply providing useful, accurate information in your ALT attributes can make your photos and pictures more discoverable on the web. Ms Emmy Cutts also makes an appearance.



Like videos? Hate them? Have a great idea we should cover? Let us know what you think in our Webmaster Help Group.

Update: Some of you have asked about the difference between the "alt" and "title" attributes. According to the W3C recommendations, the "alt" attribute specifies an alternate text for user agents that cannot display images, forms or applets. The "title" attribute is a bit different: it "offers advisory information about the element for which it is set." As the Googlebot does not see the images directly, we generally concentrate on the information provided in the "alt" attribute. Feel free to supplement the "alt" attribute with "title" and other attributes if they provide value to your users!

A spider's view of Web 2.0

Written by Michael Wyszomierski and Greg Grothaus, Search Quality

Update on July 29, 2010: We've improved our Flash indexing capability and we also now support an AJAX crawling scheme! Please check out the posts (linked above) for more details.

Many webmasters have discovered the advantages of using Ajax to improve the user experience on their sites, creating dynamic pages that act as powerful web applications. But, like Flash, Ajax can make a site difficult for search engines to index if the technology is not implemented carefully. As promised in our post answering questions about Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology, we've compiled some tips for creating Ajax-enhanced websites that are also understood by search engines.

How will Google see my site?

One of the main issues with Ajax sites is that while Googlebot is great at following and understanding the structure of HTML links, it can have a difficult time finding its way around sites which use JavaScript for navigation. While we are working to better understand JavaScript, your best bet for creating a site that's crawlable by Google and other search engines is to provide HTML links to your content.

Design for accessibility

We encourage webmasters to create pages for users, not just search engines. When you're designing your Ajax site, think about the needs of your users, including those who may not be using a JavaScript-capable browser. There are plenty of such users on the web, including those using screen readers or mobile devices.

One of the easiest ways to test your site's accessibility to this type of user is to explore the site in your browser with JavaScript turned off, or by viewing it in a text-only browser such as Lynx. Viewing a site as text-only can also help you identify other content which may be hard for Googlebot to see, including images and Flash.

Develop with progressive enhancement

If you're starting from scratch, one good approach is to build your site's structure and navigation using only HTML. Then, once you have the site's pages, links, and content in place, you can spice up the appearance and interface with Ajax. Googlebot will be happy looking at the HTML, while users with modern browsers can enjoy your Ajax bonuses.

Of course you will likely have links requiring JavaScript for Ajax functionality, so here's a way to help Ajax and static links coexist:
When creating your links, format them so they'll offer a static link as well as calling a JavaScript function. That way you'll have the Ajax functionality for JavaScript users, while non-JavaScript users can ignore the script and follow the link. For example:

<a href=”ajax.htm?foo=32” onClick=”navigate('ajax.html#foo=32'); return false”>foo 32</a>

Note that the static link's URL has a parameter (?foo=32) instead of a fragment (#foo=32), which is used by the Ajax code. This is important, as search engines understand URL parameters but often ignore fragments. Web developer Jeremy Keith labeled this technique as Hijax. Since you now offer static links, users and search engines can link to the exact content they want to share or reference.

While we're constantly improving our crawling capability, using HTML links remains a strong way to help us (as well as other search engines, mobile devices and users) better understand your site's structure.

Follow the guidelines

In addition to the tips described here, we encourage you to also check out our Webmaster Guidelines for more information about what can make a site good for Google and your users. The guidelines also point out some practices to avoid, including sneaky JavaScript redirects. A general rule to follow is that while you can provide users different experiences based on their capabilities, the content should remain the same. For example, imagine we've created a page for Wysz's Hamster Farm. The top of the page has a heading of "Wysz's Hamster Farm," and below it is an Ajax-powered slideshow of the latest hamster arrivals. Turning JavaScript off on the same page shouldn't surprise a user with additional text reading:

Wysz's Hamster Farm -- hamsters, best hamsters, cheap hamsters, free hamsters, pets, farms, hamster farmers, dancing hamsters, rodents, hampsters, hamsers, best hamster resource, pet toys, dancing lessons, cute, hamster tricks, pet food, hamster habitat, hamster hotels, hamster birthday gift ideas and more!

A more ideal implementation would display the same text whether JavaScript was enabled or not, and in the best scenario, offer an HTML version of the slideshow to non-JavaScript users.

This is a pretty advanced topic, so please continue the discussion by asking questions and sharing ideas over in the Webmaster Help Group. See you there!

Server location, cross-linking, and Web 2.0 technology thoughts

Written by Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur, Search Quality Team

Held on June 27th, Searchnomics 2007 gave us (Greg Grothaus and Shashi Thakur) a chance to meet webmasters and answer some of their questions. As we're both engineers focused on improving search quality, the feedback was extremely valuable. Here's our take on the conference and a recap of some of what we talked about there.

Shashi: While I've worked at Google for over a year, this was my first time speaking at a conference. I spoke on the "Search Engine Friendly Design" panel. The exchanges were hugely valuable, helping me grasp some of the concerns of webmasters. Greg and I thought it would be valuable to share our responses to a few questions:

Does location of server matter? I use a .com domain but my content is for customers in the UK.

In our understanding of web content, Google considers both the IP address and the top-level domain (e.g. .com, .co.uk). Because we attempt to serve geographically relevant content, we factor domains that have a regional significance. For example, ".co.uk " domains are likely very relevant for user queries originating from the UK. In the absence of a significant top-level domain, we often use the web server's IP address as an added hint in our understanding of content.

I have many different sites. Can I cross-link between them?

Before you begin cross-linking sites, consider the user's perspective and whether the crosslinks provide value. If the sites are related in business -- e.g., an auto manual site linking to an auto parts retail site, then it could make sense -- the links are organic and useful. Cross-linking between dozens or hundreds of sites, however, probably doesn't provide value, and I would not recommend it.

Greg: Like Shashi, this was also my first opportunity to speak at a conference as a Googler. It was refreshing to hear feedback from the people who use the software we work every day to perfect. The session also underscored the argument that we're just at the beginning of search and have a long way to go. I spoke on the subject of Web 2.0 technologies. It was clear that many people are intimidated by the challenges of building a Web 2.0 site with respect to search engines. We understand these concerns. You should expect see more feedback from us on this subject, both at conferences and through our blog.

Any special guidance for DHTML/AJAX/Flash documents?

It's important to make sure that content and navigation can be rendered/negotiated using only HTML. So long as the content and navigation are the same for search crawlers and end users, you're more than welcome to use advanced technologies such as Flash and/or Javascript to improve the user experience using a richer presentation. In "Best uses of Flash," we wrote in more detail about this, and are working on a post about AJAX technology.

Best uses of Flash

Written by Mark Berghausen, Search Quality Team

We occasionally get questions on the Webmaster Help Group about how webmasters should work with Adobe Flash. I thought it would be worthwhile to write a few words about the search considerations designers should think about when building a Flash-heavy site.

As many of you already know, Flash is inherently a visual medium, and Googlebot doesn't have eyes. Googlebot can typically read Flash files and extract the text and links in them, but the structure and context are missing. Moreover, textual contents are sometimes stored in Flash as graphics, and since Googlebot doesn't currently have the algorithmic eyes needed to read these graphics, these important keywords can be missed entirely. All of this means that even if your Flash content is in our index, it might be missing some text, content, or links. Worse, while Googlebot can understand some Flash files, not all Internet spiders can.

So what's an honest web designer to do? The only hard and fast rule is to show Googlebot the exact same thing as your users. If you don't, your site risks appearing suspicious to our search algorithms. This simple rule covers a lot of cases including cloaking, JavaScript redirects, hidden text, and doorway pages. And our engineers have gathered a few more practical suggestions:

1. Try to use Flash only where it is needed. Many rich media sites such as Google's YouTube use Flash for rich media but rely on HTML for content and navigation. You can too, by limiting Flash to on-page accents and rich media, not content and navigation. In addition to making your site Googlebot-friendly, this makes you site accessible to a larger audience, including, for example, blind people using screen readers, users of old or non-standard browsers, and those on limited low-bandwidth connections such as on a cell phone or PDA. As a bonus, your visitors can use bookmarks effectively, and can email links to your pages to their friends.
2. sIFR: Some websites use Flash to force the browser to display headers, pull quotes, or other textual elements in a font that the user may not have installed on their computer. A technique like sIFR still lets non-Flash readers read a page, since the content/navigation is actually in the HTML -- it's just displayed by an embedded Flash object.
3. Non-Flash Versions: A common way that we see Flash used is as a front page "splash screen" where the root URL of a website has a Flash intro that links to HTML content deeper into the site. In this case, make sure there is a regular HTML link on that front page to a non-Flash page where a user can navigate throughout your site without the need for Flash.
   

If you have other ideas that don't violate these guidelines that you'd like to ask about, feel free to ask them in the Webmaster Help Group under Crawling, Indexing, and Ranking. The many knowledgeable webmasters there, along with myself and a cadre of other Googlers, will do our best to clear up any confusion.

Update: See our additional blog posts about Flash Indexing at Google.