Get the net - November 2004 |
by Julie Howell, Digital
Policy Development Officer, RNIB |
| In past editions of Get the net
we've looked at search engines, those websites that we use to
find information on the web. |
| Many blind and partially sighted people
say that Google (www.google.co.uk)
is their favourite search engine. Google is famous for its simplicity.
It is easy to use and its database is huge. Any information
you need, to help you answer that tricky pub quiz question or
to find a list of UK cinemas that offer audio description, Google
can produce the answers at lightening speed. |
| However, there's a major drawback with Google
and all of the major search engines. While they will produce
a very comprehensive list of results that match your query,
there is no telling whether the websites they suggest are accessible
to blind and partially sighted people. |
| Just how annoying is it when your search engine
lists among its results what appears from the brief description
to be the website that holds the information you are looking
for. But when you try to read the website with your screenreader
you are met with silence or scrambled sentences and paragraphs.
Or a large quantity of images that have no useful description.
Perhaps you're using a screen magnification package, but the
website you urgently need to read has fixed font size text and
no matter how hard you try you can't read to the end of the
sentence because the text disappears off the right hand side
of the screen. Absolutely useless and frustrating. |
| Last month I met Paul Crichton, after hearing
that he was developing a new search engine that only displays
results accessible to blind and partially sighted people. What
a great idea! |
| I asked Paul to tell us about net-guide
(www.net-guide.co.uk)
and what readers of Get the net can do to help
him develop the project into a really useful tool for blind
and partially sighted people. |
| what is net-guide? |
| Net-guide is an internet search engine and website
directory. It has been designed to be easy to use, regardless
of whether or not you are blind or partially sighted. What makes
net-guide unique is that all the websites in its database have
been checked and rated for accessibility, so that you have an
idea of the ease of use of the websites returned in response
to your search or from browsing the directories. Additionally,
net-guide does not carry advertising or provide paid placement
for websites. Consequently, results are determined only by relevance
to your search and ease and accessibility rating. |
| The internet should provide an interesting and
enjoyable user experience to all. net-guide helps to eliminate
some of the frustrations that can come from using the main search
engines, which - even though they may themselves be easy to
use - provide inaccessible results. |
| How did you become interested in accessibility? |
| Professionally, net-progress
have always been interested in accessibility as its part of
our design philosophy. Good design should make sites easy to
use and navigate, and make content quick and easy to find, rather
than obstruct these goals. |
| Personally, my grandfather has suffered from failing
eyesight for a number of years, which made me aware of some
of the issues he has to deal with on a daily basis. I’ve
also recently started working with a partially sighted friend
on net-guide and other sites, who helped me understand some
of the issues that related specifically to the internet. |
| How do you rate the sites in the net-guide
database for accessibility? |
| We manually assess a number of sample pages on
a website to see how they measure up against the accessibility
guidelines published by the World Wide Web Consortium Web Accessibility
Initiative. |
| We then give the website an accessibility rating
based upon their performance against those guidelines. A website
that passes all the tests receives a rating of “excellent”
and should present no obstacles to any groups of users. There
are five ratings in all, from “excellent” to “poor”. |
| If our readers find a web site they think
should be added to net guide, what should they do? |
| You can do this in one of two ways. You can either
visit net-guide, where they can complete a very short form that
will be sent to us. Alternatively, you can email us directly.
If you want to tell us about more than one website, we would
recommend emailing us directly. |
| We would be very grateful for your suggestions
as these are the very best recommendations for accessibility
that a website can have. |
| Paul finished by saying, "We are committed
to making net-guide a valuable resource for visually and physically
disabled internet users. Any feedback on sites to add, ways
to improve net-guide, or related areas that your readers would
like us to develop, would be gratefully received. As you are
representative of who we have made net-guide for, we welcome
your help in developing it and making it address their needs." |
Related links [open in a new window] |
| Royal
National Institute of the Blind |
| New
Beacon |
| |
| return to the press
releases index page |
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