Terry Thompson posted a good example of how the Google Accessible 
Search can work a while back on the ATHEN list.

Patrick

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I don't think Google's Accessible Search rewards "text only" sites. It seems
to look for good heading structure, alt text on images, HTML (as opposed to
Flash), etc. and factors all this in when ranking which sites best meet the
user's search needs. The idea is to provide search results that users can
access. On the other hand, one blind colleague has said that relevance is of
more interest to her than accessibility - she would rather struggle through
a relatively inaccessible site if that's the site with the best information.
This is a valid point, but she can always use the standard Google search -
at least with the new Accessible search users have a choice.

As an example of Google's Accessible Search, here's a repost of a test I did
recently - sorry for the cross-post for those who may have seen this on
another list...

My seach was for "Monster House", since my kids have been wanting to see the
movie. A standard Google search (NOT using Accessible Search) returns the
following:

1. The official Monster House home page at sonypictures.com. The entire site
was created in Flash, and is not at all accessible.

2. The Apple Trailers Monster House page - highly graphic, but all graphics
have ALT tags. Links from this page lead to movie trailers.

3. The IMDB.com Monster House page, which uses frames, has poorly tagged
graphics, and is very challenging for a screen reader user.

4. The rottentomatoes.com Monster House page, which is a very busy page with
multiple layers of navigation, no valid HTML structure, and no means of
skipping past the navigation to get to the main content of the page. Again,
very difficult for a screen reader user to access.

In contrast, when I do the same search using Google's Accessible Search, the
Apple Trailers page is the only one of the original four that shows up in
the first page of results. The Apple Trailers page doesn't move up to #1
though - it's #3, superceded by a couple of pages that are at least equally
accessible yet seem to have more information. The accessible top 4 are:

1. A review at cinematical.com. There's a lot of crap at the top of the
page, and the page uses iframes, but these shortcomings are offset by its
use of valid HTML headings, so a screen reader user can with one keystroke
jump directly to the main content, and everything is text from that point
on.

2. Wikipedia's Monster House entry. Highly accessible, and highly
informative (*too* informative for those who haven't seen the movie yet)

3. Apple Trailers, described above.

4. Monster House page at movietickets.com - This page has a valid HTML
heading structure, and even has label tags on form fields.

So, a screen reader user could get the scoop on Monster House much more
quickly with Accessible Search than without, and could even order tickets.

Terry Thompson
DO-IT/AccessIT
University of Washington
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