diluting accessiblity regulations
You hit the nail on the head.
'Undue burden' is the getout clause provided for not being accessible and not having to do anything about it.
In which case can google now place 'undue burden' onto the WWW?
From my experience providing an alternative search option giving different results will have the Blind and partially sighted community asking "why should we be different because we are optically challenged?" (the word blind is not in polite use these days I am told) We should be able to get the same results as everyone else and be able to use assistive technology to surf the same sites as everyone else."
On a personal level I would welcome a move into all search results from Google if it affects ranking points across the board. Most of my competitors within my business would be left stranded buying me coffees in the local coffee shops and asking (maybe in Greek) " 'scuse me mister P what is 'ccessibility???" whilst with a only few minutes work I could be totally accessible....again.
But I question the need for this. I also question how do you define the standard form of assistive technology. Again in my experience the government designers and web professionals all have expensive assistive programs. Joe Public cannot afford these so use older (and often free) programs. I still have a copy of "Brookes talk" created a few years ago by Brookes university in Oxford (UK)It is a simple program and I had their permission to give it away to all the disabled people I was then working with. (also got it in Spanish somewhere!) I always disagreed with the W3C accessibility guys on what was accessible. I still maintain if you can switch off the monitor and still surf the site then that site is accessible, anything else is hogwash. They disagree there must be other factors concidered.
Therefore I ask again the original question
"Is this google's way of complying with the ADA,DDA and 508? and who (ahem) within the W3C has been taken onboard to advise on this??????"
Here we go MIB knocking on my door again.....
smiles
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