Google Labs has just unveiled it’s new Accessible Search tool designed to favour pages that are most likely to be accessible to visually impaired users.

This is good news for accessibility. When Google puts something new out there, people tend to prick up their ears and jump onboard. If Google can rank pages according to how accessible they are, then suddenly there’s another powerful reason to incorporate accessibility into new and existing web sites.

But this will not only benefit those with disabilities. Web site’s designed with accessibility in mind tend to be more user-friendly overall, if only because accessibility guidelines advise on best-practice and discourage clumsy and restrictive bad-habits and gimmicks. Everybody should benefit.

So well done Google, I hope this tool makes it out of the lab, and impacts the web in the way that I think it will.

Now to blow my own trumpet… the National Galleries site I coded comes top on a keyword search for ’summer exhibitions’…
http://www.google.com/u/accessible?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cx=accessible%21&q=summer+exhibitions&btnG=Search

And my latest code updates on Monster.co.uk rank really well too …
http://www.google.com/u/accessible?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&cx=accessible%21&q=career+advice&btnG=Search
http://www.google.com/u/accessible?cx=accessible%21&q=search+jobs&btnG=Search

Who’s the daddy!?

More about the new search tool can be read over at The Register.

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