Google’s motto, is “do no evil,” and its mission is to organize information and make it universally accesible. So the aim is to bring information to as wide an audience as possible. This is why Google is trying to bring its products and services to a wide audience, across languages and countries. And with accessibility in mind, Google has also made some steps to ensure that their services can be accessed by as many people possible, including those of us who are “differently abled.”

For instance, there’s the audio option for the CAPTCHA anti-spam verification on Google. People who are visually-impaired usually have a hard time reading the garbled and malformed letters that CAPTCHA forms usually put out–actually even those of us with perfect vision tend to mess up when reading CAPTCHA images. This system will read out the letters as sound, such that human users can listen and type in, but machines or bots won’t be able to understand it.

Google has recently released a new application in beta, the Google Accessible Search.

Accessible search makes looking for information easier by removing the visual clutter and making the site text easier for text readers (software that translates on-screen copy into audible cues, or into Braille outputs) to read. The Accessible search also displays search results according to how accessible pages are. So given an equal ranking for a certain keyword, a site that is considered to be more accessible would be ranked higher than one that is not as much.

While accessibility is, indeed, subjective, Google follows certain “rules” in determining how easily a page is readable. First, there’s the markup. Sites that follow standard XHTML have the design elements separate from the content, making it easier for machines to read the copy. Then there’s visual clutter. Sites that use images sparingly are easier to use and navigate. Then there’s navigability. Sites that use standard links provide for easy navigation. In contrast, sites that use scripts for drop-down menus and other fancy navigation systems are more difficult to browse, particularly for machines (including text readers).

Now one question that had come up from user feedback is how to improve one’s ranking in terms of accessible search. We’ll talk about that next.