[
a11y-july-07-overview.html 4K ]
Overview Of Accessible Services From Google
Overview Of Accessible Solutions From Google
Google provides a wide variety of services that are mostly
accessed with a Web browser. Google's primary service --- Web
Search --- has a very simple user interface and has always been
highly accessible from a variety of user environments. Newer
services that present highly interactive user interfaces continue
to present accessibility challenges. We are committed to finding
accessibility solutions that make our services work better for
all of our users.
Here is a list of accessibility related services from
Google including solutions to some accessibility challenges.
-
Web Search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections.
-
Accessible Search: promotes results that are accessible.
-
Book Search: Provides full-text access to public-domain works.
-
GMail: Provides a simple yet functional HTML mode that works well with screenreaders.
-
GMail Mobile: Provides a light-weight user interface that is
also speech-friendly.
-
Google Maps: Provides easy-to-use textual directions.
-
Calendar: Provides a functional, yet speech-friendly user interface.
-
Audio Captchas: All services that use Google Accounts provide audio captchas alongside visual captchas.
-
Mobile Transcoder: Provides a mobile lens for viewing the Web that produces accessible views.
-
Google Video: allows uploaded videos to contain captions/subtitles
in multiple languages for viewers who are hearing-impaired or
unfamiliar with the original language.
-
Google Talk: IM clients inside a Web browser can pose
accessibility challenges, but the use of the open Jabber API
means that Google users can choose from a variety of Jabber
clients, many of which work well with adaptive technologies.
-
Web APIs: In addition, many Google services offer high-level
Web APIs that aid in authoring mashups; this provides a
means for creating highly customized accessible views.
Finally, many Google services such as
Google Scholar,
Google News,
Blogger and
Google Product Search work out of the
box. While today's screenreaders can hit some bumps on the road
when using more advanced features in these products,
these web interfaces degrade gracefully to provide a functional
interface.
We invite users to participate in our user community. Please
tell us what works well, share your own tips on using Google
services, and make sure to tell us what could be made even better!
Author: T.V Raman
<raman@google.com>
Date: 2007/07/03 13:58:22
--
Best Regards,
--raman
Title: Research Scientist
Email: raman@google.com
WWW: http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/
Google: tv+raman
GTalk: raman@google.com, tv.raman.tv@gmail.com
PGP: http://emacspeak.sf.net/raman/raman-almaden.asc
