Making Search Accessible to Visually Impaired Users
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Until recently, the needs of visually impaired users wasn't a top priority for search engines. That's changed, but there are still issues that need to be resolved, according to people with vision challenges.
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While more search marketers are becoming aware of usability and accessibility concerns, the numbers are still very small. A new lawsuit filed in California has the potential to change that.
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When hard a work coding, browser windows with manual entries have a nasty habit of multiplying (at least when I work). So, neededless to say, I was happy to find GotAPI.com, a site that compiles the reference materials for several different web development languages into one handy browser window.  The page, by default, searches HTML resources, including the W3C specs and Microsoft's MSDN materials. Those and the w3schools website show up often in the other languages available - CSS, XSL, XML, and XPath. The PHP manual that's referenced is just pulled from the PHP.net site, but it's still nice to have it all right there.  When searching, a "suggeted terms" box pops up to help you narrow down the search faster. It searches not only the beginnings of the words for your term, but it looks inside them as well, matching anywhere.   It would be nice if the site had some kind of bookmarking system built into it - then you could keep a reference and just flip back and forth between the pages with a single click of the mouse.
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The Mountain View, Calif. search company is debuting new functionality that will allow users to drill down to localized news.
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Blog: Microsoft's proposed changes to search functions in Windows Vista, per a pact last week with regulators, don't go far enough to promote "user choice," search giant tells antitrust judge in new filing.
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Ads served to search query results based on category rather than keywords.
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There is an interesting post on OnLamp.com that mentions the search for a good wiki system. Read the post to find out why the author thinks that the wiki world "needs the kind of vision that will make the product more accessible, more polished, less prone to abandonment or neglect...", and the several comments that follow.
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You could be next in the firing line Comment There are two cases, that I am aware of, moving through the courts in the US relating to accessibility of IT solutions.â¦
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Teaching search engines to see Web pages the way people do could improve their performance.
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Focus your search results automatically by including characters and words that put a finer point on your queries.
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New Search Suggest tool tries to guess what you're looking for and offers a drop-down list of terms.
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The world's most popular search engine has launched a new tool to improve access to academic publications.
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TechWeb - The rise of Google, Yahoo and specialized search providers has radically altered our perception of information access, yet enterprise search implementations haven't kept up with the transformation in the consumer world. Plenty of vendors are developing breakthroughs, but the missing player has been Microsoft, and many believe progress in enterprise search is being held hostage by long and unwieldy upgrade cycles for systems including Windows, Office and SharePoint. Look beyond quick fixes and bring search into your strategic information management strategy.
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The AccessMusic project provides a set of tools for creating accessible music which are freely available to download. These tools allow you to convert music scores from traditional western music notation to formats for the Blind and visually impaired.   As part of the i-Maestro project the accessible music production code was extended to provide accessible "viewers" that could be coupled onto any existing music notation editor. The code for these interfaces is provided in the hope that it can be of use in other projects. For I-Maestro the interfaces were coupled to a Symbolic Music Representation editor developed by the University of Florence. However they were designed with reusability in mind to allow easy coupling onto any editor.  See http://accessmusic.sourceforge.net/interfaces.php for further details.  Source code will be uploaded to subversion over the next couple of days.
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Are kid-friendly search engines worth using, or are they better served by the major engines?
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Search engines are starting to get up close and personal with many web users.
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Mac users upgrading to Leopard will find a refinedd and improved Spotlight search feature, as our Macworld colleague explains.