Accessibility 3

http://www.gotheblag.net46.net
Webmaster tips for creating accessible, crawlable sites
Monday, April 14, 2008 at 10:47 AM
Written by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist
Raman and Hubbell at home
Hubbell and I enjoying the day at our home in California. Please feel free to view my earlier post about accessibility for webmasters, as well as additional articles I've written for the Official Google blog.

One of the most frequently asked questions about Accessible Search is: What can I do to make my site rank well on Accessible Search? At the same time, webmasters often ask a similar but broader question: What can I do to rank high on Google Search?

Well I'm pleased to tell you that you can kill two birds with one stone: critical site features such as site navigation can be created to work for all users, including our own Googlebot. Below are a few tips for you to consider.

Ensure that all critical content is reachable

To access content, it needs to be reachable. Users and web crawlers reach content by navigating through hyperlinks, so as a critical first step, ensure that all content on your site is reachable via plain HTML hyperlinks, and avoid hiding critical portions of your site behind technologies such as JavaScript or Flash.

Plain hyperlinks are hyperlinks created via an HTML anchor element . Next, ensure that the target of all hyperlinks i.e. elements are real URLs, rather than using an empty hyperlink while deferring hyperlink behavior to an onclick handler.

In short, avoid hyperlinks of the form:
Product Catalog

In preference of simpler links, such as:
Product Catalog

Ensure that content is readable

To be useful, content needs to be readable by everyone. Ensure that all important content on your site is present within the text of HTML documents. Content needs to be available without needing to evaluate scripts on a page. Content hidden behind Flash animations or text generated within the browser by executable JavaScript remains opaque to the Googlebot, as well as to most blind users.

Ensure that content is available in reading order

Having discovered and arrived at your readable content, a user needs to be able to follow the content you've put together in its logical reading order. If you are using a complex, multi-column layout for most of the content on your site, you might wish to step back and analyze how you are achieving the desired effect. For example, using deeply-nested HTML tables makes it difficult to link together related pieces of text in a logical manner.

The same effect can often be achieved using CSS and logically organized

elements in HTML. As an added bonus, you will find that your site renders much faster as a result.

Supplement all visual content--don't be afraid of redundancy!

Making information accessible to all does not mean that you need to 'dumb down' your site to simple text. Making your content maximally redundant is critical in ensuring that your content is maximally useful to everyone. Here are a few simple tips:

* Ensure that content communicated via images is available when those images are missing. This goes further than adding appropriate alt attributes to relevant images. Ensure that the text surrounding the image does an adequate job of setting the context for why the image is being used, as well as detailing the conclusions you expect a person seeing the image to draw. In short, if you want to make sure everyone knows it's a picture of a bridge, wrap that text around the image.

* Add relevant summaries and captions to tables so that the reader can gain a high-level appreciation for the information being conveyed before delving into the details contained within.

* Accompany visual animations such as data displays with a detailed textual summary.

Following these simple tips greatly increases the quality of your landing pages for everyone. As a positive side-effect, you'll most likely discover that your site gets better indexed!

Accessibility 2

http://www.gotheblag.net46.net
Design patterns for accessible, crawlable and indexable content
Friday, May 09, 2008 at 2:02 PM
Written by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

As a follow-up to my previous posts on accessibility, here are some design recommendations for creating web content that remains usable by the widest possible audience while helping ensure that the content gets indexed and crawled.

Avoid spurious XMLHttpRequests

Pages that enable users to look up information often use XMLHttpRequests to populate the page with additional information after the page has loaded. When using this pattern, ensure that your initial page has useful information on it -- otherwise Googlebot as well as those users who have disabled scripting in their browser may believe that your site contains only the message "loading..."

CSS sprites and navigation links

Having meaningful text to go with navigational links is equally important for Googlebot as well as users who cannot perceive the meaning of an image. While designing the look and feel of navigational links on your site, you may have chosen to go with images that function as links, e.g., by placing tags within p elements. That design enables you to place the descriptive text as an alt attribute on the tag.

But what if you've switched to using CSS sprites to optimize page loading? It's still possible to include that all-important descriptive text when applying CSS sprites; for a possible solution, see how the Google logo and the various nav-links at the bottom of the Google Results page are coded. In brief, we placed the descriptive text right under the CSS-sprited image.

Google search results with CSS enabled


Google search result with CSS disabled ("Google" sprited image lost, descriptive "Google" link remains)


Use unobtrusive JavaScript

We've talked about the concept of progressive enhancement when creating a rich, interactive site. As you add features, also use unobtrusive JavaScript techniques for creating JavaScript-powered web pages that degrade gracefully. These techniques ensure that your content remains accessible by the widest possible user base without the need to sacrifice the more interactive features of Web 2.0 applications.

Make printer-friendly versions easily available

Web sites with highly interactive visual designs often provide all of the content for a given story as a printer-friendly version. Generated from the same content as the interactive version, these are an excellent source of high-quality content for both the Googlebot as well as visually impaired users unable to experience all of the interactive features of a web site. But all too often, these printer-friendly versions remain hidden behind scripted links of the form:

Print

Creating actual URLs for these printer-friendly versions and linking to them via plain HTML anchors will vastly improve the quality of content that gets crawled.

Print

If you're especially worried about duplicate content from the interactive and printer-friendly version, then you may want to pick a preferred version of the content and submit a Sitemap containing the preferred URL as well as try to internally link to this version. This can help Google disambiguate if we see pieces of the article show up on different URLs.

Create URLs for your useful content

As a webmaster, you have the power to mint URLs for all of the useful content that you are publishing. Exercising this power is what makes the web spin. Creating URLs for every valuable nugget you publish, and linking to them via plain old HTML hyperlinks will ensure that:

* Googlebot learns about that content,
* users can find that content,
* and users can bookmark it for returning later.

Failure to do this often forces your users to have to remember complex click trails to reach that nugget of information they know they previously viewed on your site.