Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere!
Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute.
If you’ve been following along with this months podcast, than you?’re aware that we’ve been covering the goings on at the seventeenth annual WWW2008 Conference in Beijing. In addition to delivering WOW education and training and covering the keynotes, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a handful of the delegates attending the conference.
For today’s podcast, I have the distinct pleasure of covering the topic of Web accessibility with T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google.
T.V. is legally blind and in addition to being a truly nice guy T.V. has a real handle on the topic of the need for Web accessibility and its business benefits as well. In fact, as a result of this interview, I?’ve decided to dedicate the remainder of this month?’s podcast to the topic and will be interviewing a wide variety of Web professionals for the remainder of the month of May.
Here are the questions that I asked T.V. Raman:
•Are we progressing as an industry with respect to Web accessibility?
•Why is this issue important and significant?
•How can we explain the benefits to Web accessibility to our customers and can you explain the benefits to business?
Make it point to turn up your speaker volume and hone in on this must listen to interview with T.V. Raman from Google. Check out additional resources from T.V. Raman at the Google Webmaster Blog located at: Google Webmaster Blog
Thank you for listening and watching today?’s WOW Technology Minute.
Today’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by WebProTraining.org check it out at: WebProTraining.org
Transcript:
Transcript of WOW Technology Minute – Interview with T.V. Raman
Located at – http://webprominute.org/429/Web-Web-accessibility-interview-with-tv-raman-research-scientist-at-google/
Aired – 5/8/2008
Length – 10:02
BILL CULLIFER: Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute. If you’ve been following along with this month?’s podcast, then you?’re aware that we?’ve been covering the goings on at the seventeenth annual WWW2008 Conference in Beijing. In addition to delivering WOW education and training, and covering the keynotes, I had the pleasure of meeting and interviewing a handful of the delegates attending the conference. For today?’s podcast, I have the distinct pleasure of covering the topic of Web accessibility with T.V. Raman, Research Scientist at Google.
T.V. is legally blind and in addition to being truly a nice guy, T.V. has a real handle on the topic of the need for Web accessibility and its business benefits as well. In fact, as a result of this interview, I?’ve decided to dedicate the remainder of this month’s podcast to the topic and as a result I will be interviewing a wide variety of Web professionals for the remainder of the month of May. Make it a point to turn up your speaker volume and hone in on this must-listen interview with T.V. Raman from Google.
Good afternoon T.V. and thank you for agreeing to this interview.
T.V. RAMAN: Thank you for inviting me to this.
BILL: You bet. My question to you, T.V., you specialize in accessibility issues and that’s an area of strong interest to you, I’m curious to know, have we progressed as a profession, as an industry, on the topic of accessibility? Are we making any specific headway?
T.V.: I believe we’ve made a lot of progress. The fact that someone from your field, who is mostly focused on the webmaster field, actually does an interview on accessibility, tells us how far we’ve come. Because ten years ago if you had said accessibility we would?’ve probably said, you know, is the website accessible from some corner of the world versus another. So I believe it’s come a long way. And the way I look at it you can always ask, is the cup half full or half empty? But we as an industry should all congratulate ourselves on the fact that, first of all, the cup is a lot bigger. So if the cup is a lot bigger, if it’s half empty, there’s a lot more to fill. And if it’s half full than there’s a lot we‘ve already filled. So, I tend to be an optimist about such things and so I think we’ve come a long way. We also created challenges as the Web evolved, but that’s part of, that’s part of me working in this field fun. There are more things to solve.
BILL: Yeah, I appreciate that. Excellent perspective. I’m really pleased to hear that we’re making progress. WOW is a Web professional organization that has a focus on education and it’s been our goal to educate individuals, teachers, those that create design, make websites today, the importance of that. And that leads to the next question. I represent a lot of practicing professionals that are certainly already aware or understand, but I also represent the thousands of individuals that consider this a brand new field. And those that teach them, that are not necessarily aware of the significance and the importance of accessibility for that audience. Could you address accessibility from your point of view and why is it significant to consider in the first place?
T.V.: So, I used to say this before I went to Google, the world’s most influential that I knew is actually the Google search bot. And accessibility today is made extremely complicated by people who do that field for a living, with lots of guidelines and “you must do this and you mustn’t do that.” And so at first flash it might appear to be an extremely intimidating prospect, to answer the question “Is my large website accessible?” Or “What should I be doing?” But if you’re going to boil it down, it actually, accessibility of the Web goes back to taking the Web to its basics. The Web as a [indecipherable] term and professed by a lot of us, was all about when you put out your information, you shouldn’t be making any assumptions about the user who is going to come look at it. You shouldn’t be assuming that he has a color display, you shouldn’t be assuming that he has a large monitor, you shouldn’t be assuming that he has broadband, whatever. What has happened, and because the Web has created a lot of accessibility challenges, is in our rush to sort of deploy to the Web and get what we think of as the immediate goals that we want to achieve, sometimes we lose sight of that larger perspective, which is where a lot of accessibility challenges come from. So my advice to people in this field who are interested in looking into accessibility, yes the field is complex when you sort of investigate it and ask, for the deaf user, for the blind user, for the [indecipherable]-impaired user, for the reading disabled user, what should I do? It can get rather intimidating. But if you go back to basics, the Web as designed, is intrinsically designed to be viewed by everyone, used by everyone, accessed from everywhere. And as long as we stick to that popular goal, when doing the next level detail of what you need to do, it actually becomes a lot easier.
I like to point people in your field on some of the articles I’ve been running on the Google webmaster blog about accessibility and crawl-ability and sort of kill two birds with one stone. What can you do to both ensure that your site is useable, viewable by a widest possible audience and at the same time also make it easy to search. Because one of the reasons I started doing this was I realized that people were spending a lot of money on search engine optimization. And as someone who has special needs and has a vested interest in accessibility, I looked at it and said, “Can we actually start explaining to people, not accessibility in terms of laws and guidelines, which are important, but also accessibility in terms of the bottom line?” So if people really cared about optimizing their sites for search engines, they’ll go out, and I’m not making this up, a lot of those optimizations also positively impact what I call the long tail of users. So, you know what the long tail of content is as a webmaster, it‘s those 80 percent of pages that are accessed by 20% of users. The long tail of users I think of as users with special needs because each one of us is different. And so if you start optimizing your site for that long tail, you make it more crawl-able, more useful and ultimately a better site.
BILL: Excellent, very well said. And thank you for expanding on that because I represent, that was one of the questions I had, I represent a lot of Web professionals that have customers that they need to educate as to the value proposition of accessibility and I think you’ve done a very good job of explaining that. The other side of that coin is there are certainly, just to summarize if I may, there are certain business reasons why small business people that have an interest in developing sites, or medium or large enterprise websites for that matter, is that it provides with better search capabilities hence providing them with a better indexing of, a more marketable website. Would that be a fair way of summarizing that?
T.V.: Yes, absolutely. The site becomes more discoverable. So if you sort of again, come down to brass tacks as a webmaster, when you put out content, why are you putting it out? You’re putting it out so that it gets viewed. How are people going to view it? They’re going to come with whatever user-agent they use, whatever technology they use. And so the fewer assumptions you’ve made, you are better off. The next level, let’s say you create your wonderful masterpiece, but then you hide it behind a flashy front page, say done in Macromedia flash or something. And so people come to the front page of yours, know about your site, click on that, see this nice animation and then see your content. But, today most people search on the Web and if it’s hidden behind a piece of flash content it’s probably not gotten crawled and so the person typing a bunch of keywords into any search engine is probably not going to find your site, which means you sort of lost something. And so, the example I give people is as webmasters we sometimes think of our sites as this fancy building that we are putting together and we create this really nice front lobby with this beautiful set of stairs going up with marble pillars everywhere. But most people on the Web are likely to jump in through the 15th floor window. So I’m not saying don’t provide that beautiful façade for your site, do put on a good front, but be aware that most of the visitors to your site will not come in through the front door. They will parachute through the ceiling, that is they?’ll come in through the 15th floor window, make sure that you’re providing them as well an equally good experience and overall make sure that they can actually parachute into your site, through some search engines.
BILL: Excellent. Makes a very good business case and I appreciate the perspective on that. In addition to being the right thing to do, for accessibility, for those that are hearing or visually impaired. So I certainly appreciate your perspective on that. T.V. thank you. This is Bill Cullifer with the World Organization of Webmasters WOW here at the 17th annual WWW Conference in Beijing, China. Thank you so much T.V. Raman from Google.
T.V.: Thank you.