> it really is just setting tab indexes in correct order, as well as making sure items have alt and title tags
Sounds like it could be part of SEO effort. If it can be checked programmatically then search engines should add accessibilty to their ranking algorithms. It worked for mobile.
These scanners exist, and they can serve a dual purpose; scan the web for websites to sue. And yes this is happening.
It's important to note that not every site on the web falls under ADA. The crucial part of this issue is that the business must have a physical “brick and mortar” location to fall under the ADA. Presumably purely online retail businesses are not affected.
IF google would make it part of their rankings it doesn't matter if you could be sued or not - you will make sure you are accessible to avoid being not found.
I wonder if google can be sued for not making it part of the ranking thus misleading blind users... Interesting angle for a lawyer. I hope someone at google is reading this and mitigates that risk.
You'd be surprised. In Florida, there have been cases which have set precedent as websites being similar to libraries, which would mean the ADA applies to purely digital places. The problem is that the ADA has never set explicit rules for website accessibility.
It's also a great way to persuade managers. Actually, a lot of the time you can just tell them you're doing SEO because nowadays they're fundamentally the same. Almost everything you do for accessibility has a positive impact on SEO.
I did accessibility dev in the mid 2000s and hand-crafted accessible html (or stripped down templates) was - at that point - easily the number 1 search result for a relevant query.
This was when css started to become useful and if you were able to make do with little outline and lots of css magic, google would be grateful. This was before the SEO craze, of course.
It's the argument I made yesterday in a related thread: if the screen reader can't read it, the machine can't read it. Any machine, whether it's the Turing machine that's trying to make heads or tails of your website so it can read the text to a user, or the actual machine running in some Google data center somewhere. Or the machine running your script to make life a bit less of a series of button clicks.
If that doesn't convince you, then have some pride in your craft, some attention to detail. Visually impaired users aren't the only ones annoyed by the fact that you couldn't be bothered with tab order. We have tools, you don't need me to tell you that you're lazy (or overworked, or underbudgetted...), the machine will do that for you.
I would be surprised if Google didn't know a given customer was disabled and serve up accessible results. Whether that is something an engineer deliberately coded or whether it was an algorithm that learned that a given cluster of users exhibits a strong preference for accessible sites.
For the SEO motivation to succeed, I think search engines would have to regress (by definition of "search engine" and its goals) to serve accessible results to users who don't need it. I'm not opposed to this as a solution, but it requires some interesting decisions: do governments stipulate how much of the search score for a given page is based on accessibility? Presumably it's a bad thing for governments to stipulate _how search engines work_. On the other hand, we could see search engines do this voluntarily; that would be cool and might just work because the search engine space isn't especially competitive, but if it ever becomes competitive, I don't think a gentleman's agreement to artificially boost accessible sites (at the expense of serving up the content that is genuinely most likely to satisfy a non-disabled person's query) is going to hold.
Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven: lots and lots of Google users (as a percentage of total users and absolutely) search via mobile--it behooves Google to improve their search experience by boosting mobile-friendly results, and it therefore behooves sites to optimize accordingly. We're talking about boosting accessibility beyond its market value--I think this is good and right, but I wouldn't expect to solve the problem the same way as for mobile.
>Note the distinction between accessibility and mobile--mobile was market-driven
Yes, the incentives differ. Its just that if I imagne a more accessible web and try to reverse engineer the way how it come to be I end up with ranking algorithm adjustments. Availability bias, I know :-P
There is a lot of money in SEO. Even a rumor about Google adjusting its algorithm towards accessibility could trigger improvements.
You know, I really think this would work. If Google penalised non-accessible sites and provided clear guidance on how to make sites accessible - companies and devs would take notice, and make the changes needed.
In a way it's a bit frightening that Google have that power, but it does have the opportunity to be used for good.
Honestly, if accessibility like this was one of the higher scoring mechanisms for SEO in web sites, not only would screen readers work better, but any kind of automated parsing would be orders of degrees easier.
Sounds like it could be part of SEO effort. If it can be checked programmatically then search engines should add accessibilty to their ranking algorithms. It worked for mobile.