ARIA For Google Reader: In praise of timely information access

3/12/2008 10:12:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.

The advent of RSS and ATOM feeds, and the creation of tools like Google Reader for efficiently consuming content feeds, has vastly increased the amount of information we access every day. From the perspective of someone who cannot see, content feeds are one of the major innovations of the century. They give me direct access to the actual content without first having to dig through a lot of boilerplate visual layout as happens with websites. In addition, all of this content is now available from a single page with a consistent interface.

Until now, I've enjoyed the benefits of Google Reader using a custom client. Today, we're happy to tell you that the "mainstream" Google Reader now works with off-the-shelf screenreaders, as well as Fire Vox, the self-voicing extension to Firefox. This brings the benefits of content feeds and feed readers to the vast majority of visually impaired users.

Google Reader has always had complete keyboard support. With the accessibility enhancements we've added, all user actions now produce the relevant spoken feedback via the user's adaptive technology of choice. This feedback is generated using Accessible Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA), an evolving standard for enhancing the accessibility of Web-2.0 applications. WAI-ARIA is supported at present by Firefox -- with future support forthcoming in other browsers. This is one of the primary advantages of building on open standards.

We originally prototyped these features in Google Reader using the AxsJAX framework. After extensive testing of these enhancements, we've now integrated these into the mainstream product. See the related post on the Google Reader Blog for additional technical details.

Looking forward to a better informed future for all!

Google Translation + Gmail help people communicate

2/08/2008 11:03:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Language barriers can be a primary source of accessibility problems on the web, and automatic translation, though not perfect, provides a useful solution.

We recently made our machine translation technology accessible from within Gmail and Google Talk, which gives mail and IM users instant access to translation capabilities at the point where they might most need them, e.g., when communicating with friends and colleagues around the world. If you find yourself wanting to translate a few words or short phrase, you can IM an appropriate chat-bot to obtain an immediate translation. As an example, the Google translation bot for going from English to Chinese is available as en2zh@bot.talk.google.com. In general, translation bots are named using two-letter codes for the source and target language.

Surfacing machine translation in this manner is a great example of how Web 2.0 mashups bring together useful services to create solutions that are bigger than the sum of their building blocks. I've blogged here in the past about the potential presented by web mashups for users with special needs. Using our work on AxsJAX to inject accessibility enhancements into Web applications, my officemate Charles Chen and I recently augmented Google Talk to produce appropriate spoken feedback when used with adaptive technologies such as self-voicing browsers.

The combination of machine translation, instant messaging and AxsJAX-enabled spoken output produces an interesting result that is obvious after the fact: when I use Google IM to message a translation bot, I now hear the result in the target language. This makes for a very interesting chat buddy -- one who can act as my personal interpreter!

And let's not forget that little translate this page within Google search results. Next time you find that some of the documents in your search results are non-English, try clicking on that translate link. You'll be able to specify the source and target languages to obtain an automatically generated translation. A nice thing about the translated page is that when you follow any links from that document, the newly retrieved document will be automatically translated. Thus, if you find an article in German that matches your query and you're an English speaker, you can translate from de|en (that's German to English using two letter language codes) and as you read the translated English version, following links from that document will result in their being automatically translated to English.

Public transit made easy

1/18/2008 09:40:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

A little over a year ago, I blogged about our simple textual directions as an alternative to the popular graphical Google Maps interface. Those directions help me orient myself and learn my way around. But in the interest of safety -- my own and others! -- I choose not to drive and rely heavily on public transportation.

Now that Maps has textual directions in place, it's easy to build on top of that interface to introduce new innovations that become immediately useful to someone like me. Google Transit is a great example of this -- it helps me locate public transportation options and does so in the text format that I need. In addition, it offers several nice features to help me plan my trip:

• I can specify the desired departure or arrival time.
• It will show more than one trip choice, allowing some flexibility with respect to when I'd like to start.
• It estimates the amount of walking required to get to a transit stop/station.
• It identifies the length of waiting at each transit point.
• It estimates the comparable cost of transportation options, where available.

But these aren't the only benefits. Behind the scenes is the Google Transit Feed Specification (GTFS), an open data format used by public transit agencies to upload their data. Several agencies are already using these public feeds. Though GTFS is never seen by commuters directly, it opens up a wealth of possibilities with respect to accessibility and alternative access, such as building custom user interfaces and specialized route guidance applications that are optimized for people with special needs.

Though we added this alternative view to enhance the accessibility of Google Maps for blind and low-vision users, we hope that everyone finds it a useful addition to your commute arsenal. So next time you use the Maps graphical interface, give its cousin, the simple textual directions, a try -- there might be times when you find yourself using it even if you can see.

And here's to ever more open data feeds from the various public transport agencies!

New Toolbar adds accessible features

12/21/2007 09:07:00 AM

Posted by Jonas Klink, Software Engineer, Accessibility

Last week Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer launched version 5 as a public beta. This version introduces a number of exciting features, such as making your Toolbar settings available from any computer that you log into with your Google Account, improved suggestions for broken links, as well as important changes that make Toolbar more accessible for assistive technology users.

This release adds support for Windows Accessibility APIs (used by screen readers, etc.) and enables keyboard navigation and access. From inside a browser with Toolbar installed, the global shortcut Alt+G places your cursor in the Google Toolbar search box. If you're using a screen reader, you'll hear "Google Toolbar Search". Pressing the Tab key brings keyboard focus to the button placed immediately after the search box, and right and left arrow keys move focus between buttons. More information on keyboard access is documented in the Toolbar Help Center (query 'accessibility').

Version 5 comes as a part of our ongoing efforts to enhance accessibility in our client-side and web applications, which is a matter I hardly need to mention is very important. Personally, I see my work that went into the Toolbar as an important step forward, as the product reaches a very large number of users and enables everyone to gain quick access to a multitude of useful features, through a unified UI. Adding keyboard navigation and other features that enhance the ease of access to these features benefit everyone.

We look forward to making further improvements to accessibility (including the installation process) in future releases. You can download the new Google Toolbar at http://toolbar.google.com/T5.

Accessibility mashups: AxsJAX fun with XKCD Comics

12/20/2007 09:07:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.

Earlier this year, I blogged about the potential presented by accessibility mashups with respect to delivering web interfaces that are optimized to a user's special needs. More recently, my office-mate Charles Chen and I blogged about our work on AxsJAX as a framework for leveraging Web-2.0 for injecting accessibility enhancements into web applications.

As we head into the holiday season, we decided it was time to have some fun and generate a few laughs based on what we've worked on during the year. As chance would have it, Randall Munroe, the creator of the XKCD comic strip, visited our Mountain View campus to give an extremely entertaining talk. He even made a reference to blind hacker geeks! So the temptation was too hard to resist. We had to speech-enable his comic strip.

The XKCD comics are highly visual, with a short comment from the author accompanying many of the episodes. Having a detailed written description that is visible to everyone would spoil the comic for the average user; part of the fun is to understand the jokes purely from the sketches. At the same time, notice that indexing and searching online comics runs into the same challenge that blind users face: to be able to locate past episodes, one needs access to textual transcripts that capture the essence of each sketch. To help with the latter, fans of online comics like XKCD have created a search engine devoted to indexing comic strips, replete with full text transcriptions. This is an example of a social Web application where fans can transcribe their favorite comics including XKCD.

In the Web 1.0 world, I would have to pull up an XKCD episode, then go to the site containing the transcripts, and finally find the associated transcript in order to make sense of the comic. But this is exactly where Web 2.0 mashups excel; mashups are all about bringing data from multiple Web sources into a single integrated view. Once we realized this, we were able to AxsJAX the XKCD site with a small amount of code. Now, I can browse to the XKCD comic site, and listen to each episode -- with the underlying AxsJAX-based mashup taking care of the minutiae of retrieving the relevant transcript and integrating it into the comic strip.

This approach leverages all that is powerful about web-based applications:

• Distributed accessibility --- the XKCD author does not need to create the transcripts.
• Transcripts can be integrated from across the web.
• The accessibility enhancements do not spoil the fun for XKCD readers in general.
• And with Open Source self-voicing plugins like Fire Vox, every XKCD user can listen to the strip when desired.

First year of Google WiFi

8/24/2007 10:03:00 AM

By Minnie Ingersoll, Chris Sacca & Larry Alder, Alternative Access Team

Our Mountain View WiFi network just celebrated its first anniversary, and we thought you'd appreciate a few data points. The network's 400+ mesh routers cover about 12 square miles and 25,000 homes to serve approximately 15,000 unique users each week month. Since the beginning of 2007, traffic has grown almost 10 percent each month, and the network now handles over 300 gigabytes of data each day, sent to over 100 distinct types of WiFi devices. Virtually the entire city has been taking advantage of the network, with 95 percent of the mesh routers being used on any given day.

Around the globe and across the U. S., many people are still not able to access the online services that are increasingly helpful, if not essential, tools for our daily lives. This is why we're committed to promoting alternative platforms for people to access the web, no matter where you are, what you're doing or what device you're using.

For those who have been following the effort to create a free wireless network in San Francisco, we continue to hope that EarthLink and The City will find a way to enable all San Franciscans to enjoy the free WiFi network they deserve. On a broader scale, we hope that the success of the Mountain View model will encourage others to think creatively about how to address access issues in many other communities.

Update: Corrected usage from "week" to "month."

Overview of our accessible services

7/10/2007 02:30:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

We provide a wide variety of services that are mostly accessed with a web browser. People visit Google from a large number of browsers and platforms; in addition, we also understand that every user is special and may have special needs. Accessibility at Google is about making sure that our services work well for all our users -- independent of your needs and abilities at any given time.

Web search, our primary service, has a very simple interface and has always been accessible from a variety of user environments. Newer services that present highly interactive interfaces continue to present accessibility challenges when used with specialized adaptive technologies such as screenreaders. We are committed to finding accessibility solutions that make our services work better for everyone who visits.

Here's a list of our accessibility-related services and a few solutions to some accessibility challenges.

• Web Search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections.
  
• Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.
  
• Book Search: Full-text access to public-domain works.
  
• Gmail: A simple yet functional HTML mode that works well with screenreaders.
  
• Gmail Mobile: A lightweight user interface that is also speech-friendly.
  
• Google Maps: Easy-to-use textual directions.
  
• Calendar: A functional, yet speech-friendly user interface.
  
• Audio Captchas: All services that use Google Accounts provide an audio alternative for the visual challenge-response tests that are used to distinguish humans from machines.
  
• Mobile Transcoder: A mobile lens for viewing the web that produces accessible views.
  
• Google Video: Allows uploaded videos to contain captions/subtitles in multiple languages for viewers who are hearing-impaired or unfamiliar with the original language.
  
• Google Talk: IM clients inside a web browser can pose accessibility challenges, but the use of the open Jabber API means that Google users can choose from a variety of Jabber clients, many of which work well with adaptive technologies.
  
• Web APIs: Many Google services offer high-level web APIs that aid in authoring mashups; this provides a means for creating highly customized accessible views.
• 1-800-GOOG-411: Here's an exception to the rule that we deliver most things through a web browser. Our experimental Voice Local Search service lets anyone who can speak into a phone search for a local business by name or category; get connected to the business free of charge; get the details by SMS if you’re using a mobile phone. (Just say "text message".)

Finally, many Google services such as Google Scholar, Google News, Blogger and Google Product Search work out of the box. While today's screenreaders can hit some bumps on the road when using more advanced features in these products, these web interfaces degrade gracefully to provide a functional interface.

If any of this interests you, we invite you to participate in our user community. Please tell us what works well, share your own tips on using Google services, and make sure to tell us what could be made even better.

Update: Added info on 1-800-GOOG-411.

Ever more books to read

7/03/2007 01:47:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful.

As a book lover, I couldn't have been more excited by the advent of electronic books in the early 90s. And with the rise of the Internet, the possibility of being able to discover books online was really exciting.

I work on a project at Google called Google Accessible Search, which helps promote results that are more accessible to visually impaired users. Building on that work is today's release of accessible public domain works through Google Book Search. It's opening up hundreds of thousands of books to people who use adaptive technologies such as speech output, screen readers, and Braille displays.

I'm extremely enthusiastic about many of our efforts at Google, which ultimately have the potential to make the experience of accessing information for visually impaired users just as easy as it is for those with sight. My reading used to be determined by what was available in a form I could read. But today it's a question of using Google effectively so that I can find the right thing to read. Today's Book Search launch is an excellent example of how technology is truly democratizing access to the world's information.

If you have feedback about Google's accessibility services, join our group to share tips on what works well and what could be made better.

Google and open source OCR

6/21/2007 09:11:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

As someone who cannot see, I prefer to live in a mostly paperless world. This means ruthlessly turning every piece of paper that enters my life into a set of bits that I can process digitally. I scan in everything. Until now, I have relied on commercial OCR packages to convert these images into readable text. OCR is perhaps one of the areas where the benefits of Moore's Law are most evident; today, OCR can do remarkably well when handed a page image. Until now, my only dissatisfaction with the status quo in this area has been that commercial OCR engines afford me little flexibility with respect to training them to do better on documents that are specific to me.

The advent of our own open source OCR initiative, OCRopus (source code: Ocropus Sources) is a welcome change in this regard. I introduced support for OCRopus in Emacspeak recently, and the HTML output this produces compares favorably with output from commercial OCR engines, provided you place the page at the right orientation on the scanner. OCRopus' extensibility, and the ability to express the OCR as a structured HTML document makes it an ideal starting point for producing rich spoken output. The possibilities are enormous for people being able to collectively train, customize and improve an OCR engine.

Spelling For Muggles

4/20/2007 05:32:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

English spelling is far from being phonetic -- and commonly-used proper nouns make the problem even more complex. Often the final arbiter is "it looks correct." Try writing "success" with one trailing "s" and you'll see what I mean.

This final aspect of spelling -- it "looks wrong" -- can be a serious challenge when one cannot see. I can spell well in English, and for regular English text, there are always dictionaries and spell-checkers that come to one's aid. But spelling commonly-used proper nouns that you've only heard others pronounce can still pose a challenge when writing them for the first time. Consider the following:

• We're going on a skiing holiday to Taho.
• I was in Rino last week.
• My friend lives in San Luis Obispoe.

Notice that the proper nouns in the above all contain spelling errors, and the respective Google search triggers a "did you mean" spelling suggestion as follows:

• Did you mean: Tahoe
• Did you mean: Reno
• Did you mean: san luis obispo

Over the years, I've come to find this an indispensible tool, especially in cases where there is general agreement on the web as to the correct spelling. And for the record, intelligence on the Web appears to believe that San Luis Obispo can also be spelt San Louis Obispo.

Google's spell-checking intelligence comes from examining all the documents on the web. Thus, correct spellings often dominate incorrect ones. The example of San Luis Obispo is interesting; if you take the Web as representing current accepted practice, it would appear that people do write that proper noun both ways -- i.e., Luis or Louis.

Who knows, perhaps we'll restore the o-u parity by adopting an extra "o" in Luis for the "u" that got dropped in "color."

To watch a guide-dog fly

3/22/2007 03:08:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see—tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

You might well wonder what interest I might have in image search given that I cannot see. You might be even more surprised to learn that I own a digital camera. :-) I acquired one a few years ago because the cost of taking photos with a digital camera is zero. It only took a couple of weeks before I could take relatively good pictures of my handsome guide dog. I post many of these pictures to my website -- obviously not for viewing by me, but all my friends.

But how do you easily tell friends how to find that special picture? Here Google Image search comes to the rescue. Whenever I'm surrounded by Hubbell's fan club, I want to tell people how they can view specific pictures of her on the web. Universal Resource Locators (URLs) -- those long address strings that make the web work -- are nice, but they have one major disadvantage: they're unspeakable! Thanks to search, I've not had to speak a URL in a long, long time. Instead I usually tell friends to search for [Hubbell Labrador flying] to locate pictures of her sitting on the pilot seat of an aircraft that I posted many years ago to the web.

One can think of such focused search queries as "conversational bookmarks" -- the spoken equivalent of bookmarks one saves within a traditional web browser. Notice that such conversational bookmarks are not specific to image search. I often tell people that they can find me on the web by searching Google for [raman labrador] and clicking the I'm Feeling Lucky button.

Wish I had Google Scholar as a grad student

2/23/2007 01:40:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see—tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Conducting research from the comfort of one's office or home is a wonderful convenience, but it's especially rewarding when you need to go the extra mile in accessing research publications.

When I was a graduate student at Cornell, I needed to go to the library with a reader (yes, an actual live human, not a computer:-)), find the relevant publications, and then arrange to have what I judged to be the most relevant articles read to me. Occasionally, I would scan the printed articles to OCR them and have my computer read it aloud to me. Mostly this was a failure since the articles I wanted to read were in the fields of math or computer science, and OCR dealt poorly, if at all, with technical material. More often than not, I would write to the authors of the publications in the hope of getting access to online versions so that I could save on reader time.

Turning the clock forward to today, equivalent access is a Google Scholar search away. What's more, thanks to publishers like the ACM who making journal publications available online, one can access the complete publication directly from within the search hits. Since the advent of Google Scholar, I have not had to send out email requests to authors asking for access to the electronic versions. And where authors have made these available from their websites, Google Scholar links to those as part of the result set.

So I wish I had had this as a graduate student. Though I have to say working at Google does feel like being in graduate school (but with better food and more money)—so maybe my wish has been granted.

Web APIs, web mashups and accessibility

2/02/2007 03:11:00 PM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see—tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Wikipedia defines mashup in the context of web applications as a "(web application hybrid), a website or web application that combines content from more than one source."

More generally, web mashups are created by leveraging web APIs to present data in new and innovative ways—often, such innovation comes about by combining data from a multiplicity of sources. However, notice that combining multiple data sources into new and innovative views is not the only possible use of web APIs; in particular, you can also leverage these APIs to produce alternative views of a given data source. Newer uses of web APIs such as those provided by Google Maps, Google Calendar or Google Search often fall into this category of providing convenient user access. Thus, it is possible to embed a Google Calendar or the map for a given location into one's website.

Moving from the above scenario to leveraging web APIs in the context of mashups for enabling better accessibility is but one step away. As an example, envision a very basic Google Maps mashup that embeds a map on a web page—but with zoom level set to twice the normal default. This might make a very interesting starting point for a low-vision user. Given the expressiveness of web APIs, we can go a lot further. I believe web mashups provide a very rich platform for building creative accessibility solutions with the goals of:

• Providing the ability to build highly optimized custom views for cases where a "one size fits all" solution does not work
• Experimenting with different accessibility approaches to discover solutions that work for inclusion into the mainstream

To get a sense of what is possible, see how other web developers are leveraging these APIs to provide innovative access solutions. As an example of what can be done with GData-based APIs provided by applications like Google Calendar and friends, see this trip report—Mashup Camp 3 - A Googler's Experience. In particular, notice RoboCal a mashup that provides spoken access to your calendar.

Speech-friendly textual directions from Google Maps

12/26/2006 08:31:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Google Maps and its associated local search is a quick and easy means of locating businesses and obtaining directions. Most people who use it already seem to enjoy the graphical interface with its extremely reactive GUI. But when using spoken output, this visual richness can get in the way of quickly listening to the results of a maps query.

As an alternative, Google Maps also provides a simple to use a textual interface that serves up directions very efficiently when working with a screenreader or a Braille display. This alternative view into Google Maps is here, at the Textual Maps UI (http://maps.google.com/?output=html). It's extremely useful for blind and visually impaired users, as well as an effective solution for those times when you're at a non-graphical display and need to quickly look up a location.

Just type a simple English query of the form start address to end address and quickly get the information you're looking for. Though we added this option to enhance the accessibility of Google Maps for blind and low-vision users, perhaps others will find this alternative view a useful addition to their maps arsenal.

Accessible Search: Answers to common questions

12/19/2006 09:35:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Since we launched Google Accessible Search in July, we have received lots of feedback along with many questions. I'll briefly summarize these with answers.

Q: Does Accessible Search filter out inaccessible content?
A: No. First of all, "accessible" is a very subjective measure; what's more, queries can vary widely with respect to how accessible the results are. As an example, if you are looking for information such as weather forecasts or reference material, like the definition of an unfamiliar term, the set will often consists of both accessible and inaccessible content. In these cases, Google Accessible Search promotes those results that have been measured to be more accessible. On the other hand, if the particular query is about videogames, the chances are fairly high that a majority of the best results for that query will be visually busy pages. So in the final analysis, we do not filter content in Google Accessible Search; we pick the best results exactly as we do with regular Google search, and then re-order the top results by their level of accessibility.

Q: The result set looks identical to regular search. Is this intentional?
A: The operational word in the above question is looks. Google Accessible Search does not in any way change the look and feel of Google search results. What it does is re-order results based on how accessible they are.

Q: How has Google enhanced navigating its search results?
A: Since Google Accessible Search launched, many people have sent feedback about the results page (both Google Accessible and regular search) being difficult to navigate with screenreaders. In response, we have updated the results pages in both cases to have section headers that can be used in conjunction with screenreader hotkeys to quickly skim through the page. Thus, once Google has responded to your search query, use your access technology's "move by section" keys to move between the section that displays sponsored ads and the individual results.

Q: How can I perform more complex searches?
A: Notice that http://labs.google.com/accessible has a link to Advanced Search in addition to the simple text box. Use this link to focus your search on documents in a specific language. The resulting search will continue to use Google Accessible Search for ordering the results.

Q: How can I compare regular search with Google Accessible?
A: Google Accessible Search is an experiment, and to be an effective experiment, people need to be able to easily compare the results obtained by using regular Google search versus Google Accessible. Notice that the top of the results page contains a pair of radio buttons labeled "Web Search" and "Accessible Search." You can easily repeat your search by pressing the appropriate radio button and clicking on the "submit" button.

Q: How can I make my site rank higher in Accessible Search?
A: Use our Webmaster Guidelines as a starting point. Once you've fully addressed these, I'd suggest reviewing your content to see how well it degrades gracefully. In addition to viewing the page in text-only mode (as the Guidelines suggest), also try the following additional checks:
- browse your site on a monochrome display;
- use your site without a mouse.

Update: Corrected to note that we *do not* filter Accessible Search content.

Staying informed with Google News search

12/04/2006 02:04:00 PM

Posted by T.V Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

In the information age, currency of information has high value. As someone who cannot see, I find having to skim many different news sites to stay caught up even more difficult than the average web user. As in most things, off-loading some of this work to the machine is the answer, and what better machine to offload the work to than Google News.

In addition, finding relevant news stories through Google News helps me navigate directly to the news story on the originating site. Even if the originating news site is itself visually complex, Google has done most of the hard work of surfing that site and getting me to the content I need to read. Combined with Google News finding and grouping related stories on a given topic, this is an especially effective way of staying informed.

Here are some of the ways I use Google News: For topics I regularly search for, I create Atom feeds that search topics on Google News and subscribe to them via my blog reader (Google Reader). Here is the Atom feed for locating news articles on XForms. For topics on my watch list I create Google News alerts. In addition, Google News provides feeds (RSS or Atom) for popular groupings of articles. I subscribe to the feeds for Business and Technology using Google Reader.

Together, all of the above provide an effective means for me to stay caught up -- I'm usually done with all my news reading during my 40-minute daily commute to work on the Google shuttle. In addition, note that Google News also provides a Mobile version that is very speech-friendly. For the most part I use the main Google News site, primarily because news stories of interest are mostly textual, but if some of the stories come from visually complex news sites, I often hand those off to the Google wireless transcoder so that it can present me the story in a form that is more amenable to being spoken out aloud.

Audio captchas when visual images are unusable

11/28/2006 10:34:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Wikipedia defines 'captcha' as an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart" -- a word which is trademarked by Carnegie Mellon University. Most web users think of captchas as those hard to read distorted letters or images that one often is confronted by when websites attempt to verify that they're indeed talking to a live human. Google Accounts support captchas. Of course, bloggers (no matter which platform they use) can also use them to prevent comment spam.

Captchas were never intended to be purely visual -- however, most initial implementations used fuzzy images, and in attempting to lock out automated agents also inadvertently locked out people unable to see the image. As an alternative to these, this past spring Google Services that require verification began to provide an audio alternative -- people have the option of listening to a sequence of spoken digits that they then type into a form field to verify to the web application that there is indeed a live human at the other end.

To keep the audio captcha as challenging as the visual captcha when confronted by automated agents, we add some distortion to the spoken digits, and we're still experimenting with different distortion techniques to ease the burden on the genuine human user while locking out automated agents. We welcome feedback on the effectiveness of these techniques from you (we automatically collect feedback from those evil automated agents pretending to be human) :-).

You can easily spot the availability of audio captchas by the presence of the well-recognized "wheelchair" icon for accessibility --- the image is tagged with appropriate alt text to help blind users. Incidentally you don’t have to be visually impaired to use the audio captcha; if you are in a situation where you find it hard to view the visual captcha -- either because you're at a non-graphical display, or because the specific visual challenge we offered you turned out to be unusable in a given situation, feel free to give the audio captcha a try. We've worked hard to ensure that the audio captchas work on different hardware/software combinations, and you do not need any special hardware (or software) other than a sound card to be able to use them.

Viewing the web through a mobile lens

11/20/2006 11:43:00 AM

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

Designed for cell phone users, I find the Google web transcoder has become an indispensable tool for me when I'm confronted with complex web pages. In fact when one searches the web using mobile phones, Google search hits often get redirected to go through the transcoder in order to provide the mobile user with a web page that works on small displays.

It turns out that much of the visual complexity that creates stumbling blocks for mobile users also become show-stoppers when it comes to listening to a web page using screenreaders. So the transcoder has become a useful part of my web access arsenal. You can reach it at google.com/m. From there, search for your favorite site. Think of it as the equivalent of your browser's address bar. Once you access a website through the this interface, any links you follow from that page will be automatically transcoded.