About Accessibility

Definitions of Accessibility

The concept of accessibility means different things to different people.

Moral Definition

"The power of the Web is in its universality.
Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect." Tim Berners-Lee, Inventor of the World Wide Web

Best Practice Definition

The Web is fundamentally designed to work for all people, whatever their hardware, software, language, location, or ability. World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)

Legal Definition

It is unlawful for an educational authority to discriminate against a student on the ground of the student's disability by denying the student access, or limiting the student's access, to any benefit provided by the educational authority. Section 22, Disability Discrimination Act 1992 (Cth)

Accessibility Solutions

Search Engines

The process

Begins with a list of URLs generated from previous crawls and augmented with xml sitemap data.
Source code of a page is crawled and interpreted (html, javascript, css).
Links detected (src and href) and added to list of pages to crawl.
New sites, changes to existing sites, and dead links are noted and used to update search indexes.
Pages are sorted by their content and other factors then stored in an index.
Over 200 factors are used to rank pages including site speed, content freshness, and inbound links.