Google Search For The Visually Impaired Or Partially Blind People

Google Accessible is a search engine specially designed for visually impaired or partially blind people. Though it’s still in Google lab but looks promising and helpful.

Like Google, this accessible search has plain home page but upon searching a specially designed user interface comes for results page that helps in assistance for persons who have some difficulty in seeing. Results are shown with bigger fonts and sound. Even keyboard shortcuts work with this accessible search engine. The only limitation as of now is that it requires Firefox 3+, Chrome or Safari for its helpful features to work.

Advantages of having Accessible view

You can navigate results easily and quickly.
Selected results are automatically magnified for easier viewing.
Screen readers or talking browser will automatically speak the selected results.
You can use the following shortcut keys to navigate.

Key	Action
j or DOWN	Selects the next item.
k or UP	Selects the previous item.
l or RIGHT	Moves to the next category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
h or LEFT	Moves to the previous category (results, sponsored links, refinements).
<Enter>	Opens the selected result.
/	Puts the cursor in the search box.
n	Moves to the next result, and fetches more results if necessary.
p	Moves to the previous result, reloading earlier results if necessary.
=	Magnifies current item
–	Shrinks current item
A	Switches to Accessible Search Results
W	Switches to regular Web Search Results

This specialized Google version is developed by T.V.raman, who is a compluter scientist at Google. Despite of being blind, he has done some of incredible works including Emacspeak – A full-fledged speech interface, AsTer – Audio System For Technical Readings. He has developed Aural CSS, X-forms, XML Events and XHTML+voice for w3.org. At Google he has developing Speech Enabled Eyes-Free Android Applications and accessible search engine. [read FAQ]