Google

Earlier I posted about how Google made its front page inaccessible to many people with disabilities. In the meantime, the problem got resolved, but this is not the end of story.

Just to recap, what happened was ten seconds after opening the Google front page, a sound started playing. It made it next to impossible for blind people to navigate the page with their screen reader. When you hear music, it is hard to understand your screen reader.

First of all, I would like to express my appreciation to Google that they have resolved this issue. However, there are still some things to talk about here.

Note: several hours after I wrote this post, Google fixed the accessibility problem. However, this is not a happy end. You can read my reflections about it.

How funny, if you go to Google, you can play the Pacman game from the main page. But it is not that much fun for all people.

Just picture this situation: blind people, who use their computer with a screen reader start hearing some sound, and later a siren after about ten seconds. Guess what happens, this is what they will have to listen to, instead of their screen readers reading the page to them. Or, at least, hopefully they will hear it well enough to navigate away.

Disability advocates are demanding that government do more to increase the accessibility of the Internet and broadband devices, especially mobile phones.
And their pleas haven't fallen on deaf ears.

Congressman Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat and former chairman of the House's Internet subcommittee, introduced a bill in Congress last year
that would require providers of Internet services and devices -- from desktop computers to smart phones -- to make user interfaces accessible to people
with disabilities. The bill, still in committee, has more than two dozen sponsors.

Google, Inc. has raised its offer to On2 Technologies in hopes to close the deal on a merger with the video compression technology company. This could mean
big things for On2 shareholders, as well as savvy small businesses. SEO Consultant, Eric McGehearty, is now encouraging clients to include properly formatted
videos into their websites because of the impact this merger will have on video search results.

SEATTLE - Most web sites that feature videos do not offer closed captioning, although a bill in Congress would require it. In Seattle, Thomas Verdos, who has had a hearing impairment since birth, says captions make all the difference in understanding the content of the site or program.

"You might compare it to watching television with the sound off. You don't get the story line, nothing's humorous, if you don't have the volume high enough to hear what's being said. Most people don't think about it - they don't have to think about it."

On the computer screen, young David sways drunkenly, his one remaining front tooth poking his bottom lip as he talks. "I feel funny," he moans. "Is this
real life?"

The YouTube video of a disoriented child feeling the drugs from his dental surgery got a lot of attention earlier this year, but plenty of people didn't get the joke - captions for David's existential ramblings were not available to deaf and hearing-impaired users.

That's about to change, and it's a development that goes beyond access to videos of drugged children, Kanye West behaving badly, or pirated episodes of Top Model. Google
announced yesterday that it will incorporate automatic, machine-generated captions into all English-language YouTube videos. Although captions have been available on the site since 2006, they had to be provided by the video's owner. Now voice recognition technology can insert captions.

Just recently, Mike Gifford (@mgifford) started a petition to google for developing more accessible sites. Gifford is asking google to create standards compliant, accessible sites, to set an example as google code and design is often copied by developers. But let's see what happened behind the scenes.

Google’s Book Search program will help the blind and wheelchair-bound read more, a disability group told a federal judge Wednesday, giving Google some much needed support in its attempt to create the online library and bookstore of the future.

Google has launched a new experiment aimed at improving the accessibility of its search results for blind and partially-sighted web users.

The opt-in experiment, Accessible View, allows users to navigate through Google listings by only using the keyboard and is based on World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) specifications, as well as the Google-AxsJAX HTML DOM properties for AJAX-style applications.