From the web page
http://www.atechnews.com/
Google's Dr. T.V. Raman Tells ATN Why Google
is Involved in Web Accessibility
Dr. Raman is an accomplished research computer scientist with many years
of industry experience in advanced technology development. He has
authored three books and filed over 25 patents on auditory interfaces.
He is an authority in web standards, auditory interfaces and scripting
languages. He was instrumental in creating the Accessible Search
interface at Google. The service is designed to identify sites that may
have extraneous content on them and may not be ideal for screen readers
to handle. Google exhibited at CSUN last week. John M. Williams
interviewed him.
Williams: Why was Google exhibiting at CSUN?
Dr. Raman: We are doing many things. We are building up a team of
world-class engineers to improve the accessibility of our cutting edge
products to those individuals with disabilities. Our engineers are
involved in identifying accessibly issues and developing engineering
solutions across a range of products such as Google search and AdWords,
rich internet (AJAX) applications like Google Local, and client
applications like Toolbar and Desktop Search. I addition our engineers
act as accessibility advocates to ensure Google products are built with
accessibility in mind.
One of my pet projects is to increase the overall awareness of
accessibility and to help the disability community find content that
works well for them, so there is balance between the user finding what
they want and accessibly.
As we grow our team, we are beginning to work on employing accessibility
features to some of our core products. We are also working to make our
products function better with screen readers. I am fairly active in
defining APIs that make screen readers accessible.
Williams: What are some of the major challenges in making the web
accessible to people with different disabilities?
Dr. Raman: We are definitely looking at making the web accessible to
people with different disabilities. Your question in good, but also very
broad. Let's give your question multiple approaches.
There are three pieces to your question that must be addressed, and they
are: "the web", "accessible" and "users with disabilities". The web is
the main thing. It has a lot of content. Some of the content is
accessible, and some is not. Some of it could be made more accessible by
the content providers if they were more aware of accessibly.
Then you have the web, which is thought of as interactive applications.
Our work is more concentrated there right now in making sure the right
access to information exists so that people can actually search
properly.
Finally, you have users with disabilities. One thing that we tend to
forget as an industry is that we lump all users with disabilities in one
large market. I believe that is a big mistake. Users with disabilities
have various needs. Their ability to use the web depends on what
adaptation they need. Therefore, web accessibility for people with
disabilities should be understood as doing the right thing for the user.
Williams: Are you working with disability groups on accessibility
issues?
Dr. Raman: When I came to Google a year and a half ago, I started
working with users who could not see. One of our engineers at Google is
working with the deaf community on captioning for Google Video. As we
build the team with accessibility engineers, we plan to expand our
outreach to include other groups who can work with us on our product
development.
The reason why Google remains popular with blind people as a search tool
is also the same reason that I suspect makes Google easy for senior
citizens to use. Our user interface is relatively sparse and easy.
Williams: Are you working with Vinton Cerf on accessibility issues?
Dr. Raman: Vinton Cerf is supportive of our work. He knows that making
the web accessible is doing the right thing for everyone. So do our
engineers.
Williams: As a final question, what area would you like to have Google
working on in the accessibility area that it isn't working now?
Dr. Ram: I am doing a whole bunch of things. I do not want to point a
finger and say we are not doing that. The way I think of our
accessibility work is that we are making all the world's information
accessible to everyone. Obviously people with special needs are included
in this. However, the way I explain accessibility at Google is similar
to how normal web search does a very good job on what we call the long
tail of information.
There are billions of pages on the Web, of which say the top few million
get looked at by lots and lots of people. The rest of the Web - aka the
long tail - consists of pages that are looked at by relatively fewer
people in caparison - but to each person, his/her particular portion of
the long tail in important. Google Search excels at getting users to the
right content, whatever their interests might be and we do very well at
addressing the long tail of information.
Now, visualize the same phenomenon - but with content replaced by users
- there are a vast number of Internet users. At the head you have users
with no special needs; but once you move beyond them, you get the "long
tail of users" where users have special needs that are all different.
Accessiblity at Google is about doing the right thing for the users in
the "long tail".
This i how I view accessibility for the user community. I believe that
we are doing what we need to be doing. Certainly we can be doing more.
An hopefully, what we are doing will make a difference.
Williams: Thank you.
Dr. Raman: You are welcome.
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