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In an effort to “better organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible”, Google has launched its new search product, Accessible Search.

The system is geared to prioritise search results that are more easily usable by visually impaired people (2m in the UK alone - RNIB).

“Regular Google search helps you find a set of documents that is most relevant to your tasks. Accessible Search goes one step further by helping you find the most accessible pages in that result set”

A system like this should be redundant, but the truth is there are far more inaccessible websites out there than accessible ones. This will change.  The laws are becoming stricter and web developers are becoming better at building sites that comply (W3C WCAG). This will take time, but until then tools like this will greatly improve the browsing experience for literally millions of user’s world wide.

It will be interesting to see what knock-on effects are caused by Accessible Search. Now that there is a greater Search Engine Optimisation angle to exploit will we see acceleration in building accessible sites? Who knows? One thing is for sure, Google has built a truly useful tool here and it will be interesting to see what happens next.

Check out Google’s Accessible Search here.

You can read more about what makes an accessible website here.