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Having said that, there seems to be a bit of an OOP (over-optimisation penalty) issue with making your site accessible, I'm sure I'll be corrected by someone with a large number of posts here, but alt tags are the core of assisting said users to 'view' your site, these are also prime candidates for the OOP (getting reams of 'hidden' text onto a page)
Unless you've got music playing in the background (a bad idea as far as website design goes), or require voice commands to your pages, then those users with a hearing or speech disability won't be affected.
Society disables the 'disabled'.
'View' every page on your site with your eyes closed, if it 'reads' well, you're doing the right thing.
Submit your site to a directory of 'sight-enhanced' websites, you'll have more visitors than Google could ever give you.
Tony
:)
There is a basic similarity between the needs of Google, the needs of people with limited or no sight (or hearing), and the needs of people with limited (bandwidth or processor-power) internet access.
Intelligent design for any of these groups will, I guarantee it, benefit all of them.
The reason is simple. Text is easier to process than images. Text can be compressed (a three-megabyte picture of an "A" character large enough for a person with 20-400 vision to see, can be compressed into as few as 1 to 20 bytes (including markup) and sent via ultra-low-bandwidth or burst connections (cell phones?). Text can be converted to sound; to blind-readable formats on Braille terminals; can be displayed as large or as small as the device allows and the user needs (IE's ludicrous limits on this are arbitrary, more expressive of Microsoft's contempt for its users than its grasp of technology); can be rendered in a way that will fit whatever display space the user allocates; can be parsed, indexed, filtered, transliterated for any computer ever made.
In other words, it empowers the user to do whatever is needed, with whatever neural or electronic tools are at hand. And all users benefit, not just the obviously impaired -- late at night my eyes get tired. With Mozilla I just crank up the font size; with Microsoft Wind-whatever I just curse the lame mono-sized desktop fonts and focus on work that can be done within Mozilla.
Images, as well as programs (flash, java, VB, even Javascript) lack nearly all of these advantages. They empower the proprietor of the software that makes them available, at the expense of all users. This is not to say they shouldn't be used: but they should only be used where some legitimate need is served, or in a context that retains as much of its information as possible where they are missing.
There are a lot of so-called "web designers" who have learned enough about a computer to use Photoshop, and offer their services creating newspaper brochures to post on the net. The world would be better off if someone cut their internet cable and put them back to work designing used car ads for the daily papers. And there are some so-called "programmers" who are really one-tool wonders -- whatever your problem, they've got a gratuitous gimmick to address it, and anyone who doesn't have the latest hardware supporting that gimmick has ... their undiluted contempt. Somebody, please take away their monitors, and lead them back to the keypunch machine. [full disclosure: I'm a programmer, and I even remember punch paper tape. My graphical skills almost extend to recognizing simple line drawings of polygons.]
The right attitude toward ANY engineering task is: use the smallest hammer that will do the job. And the "text hammer" is both much smaller and much more versatile than any of the other options. And, if you don't mind accidentally providing a social benefit, you'll have given society a tool to enfranchise people in ways they never have been before.
IMHO
If you use the tools available for their correct use and not as tools to over optimise, then, I believe, you are definitely going in the right direction.
Alt tags are just that, Alternative text tags, not spam tags. If your image is relative to the content then concise alt text, describing the image, should be more than enough to aid: a)the impaired, and b)your position on search engines. Just as with title tags or any tags available.......
That's just the way I see it, of course!
But then I don't put all my eggs in the same basket of course! ;)
Hello guys does making the website friendly to blind or partially blind and deaf and mute browsers improve my PR with Google?
PR or PageRank is not your position in the SERPs, but instead is only a value calculated on the number and quality of your incoming links.
So making your site accessible will not in and of itself improve your PR. But over time I would expect it to help your PR, as you might get some links *because* you have made your site accessible.
Technology can be used to disenfranchise people, or to give power to more people. whiterabbit would apparently prefer the former; I'll take the other side
beltmelt, I'm saying (in plain english) create your site with the partially-sighted/blind user in mind, but don't expect any favours from the SE's.
Tony
Also, another point on the original question: the answer to this is "No, it probably won't improve your PR. And so what? Did you ever get a visitor because of PR? No, and you won't. What gets you visitors is high position in search results combined with decent snippeting; what gets you high position in search results is page rank (PR) + page relevancy.
The answer to the question you might have asked is: Yes, good text-driven design will improve your RELEVANCY and your SNIPPETS, which will increase your hits -- but, as whiterabbit suggests, there are other things you ALSO ought to be doing to target sight-impaired people.
