Google reaching out to blind customers with new tools


Google just recently started testing new tools to make it easier for blind customers to search for and find information using Google's ubiquitous search engine. T.V. Raman, a Google engineer who is blind, said that so much information clogs most webpages these days that even magnifying websites with on-screen software tools wastes too much time by visually-impaired customers who spend too much time sifting through extraneous web content looking for what they need.

A solution that was also looked at was the text-to-speech solutions that would read web content to visually-impaired Google users, but this too was labeled as ineffective due to the sheer amount of content on most web pages. The software cannot distinguish what the blind customer may be wanting to read on the page, and therefore, reads everything, again wasting a customer's time.

The new Google features include the design and study of websites to understand, in an automated way, how a blind person may perceive the content. The layout, amount of content and display parameters of content are all part of the complex puzzle a blind Google user needs to know before attempting to *read* a Google-searched website. This is a great example of Google making a real solution to a real customer problem -- kudos to them in a large way.

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