Accessibility Improvements To Google News

I just noticed this yesterday. I usually read Google News on my Nokia N82. It’s sort of like a morning paper. So it wasn’t until recently that I noticed the regular version of google news had gotten some recent accessibility enhancements. The most important is that each news story is now, finally, a heading. This means that screen reader users can jump from story to story with a single command, instead of cursoring down through all the story content. This makes things much, much quicker! The second is that an ARIA enhanced version of google news is now available. I’m not sure exactly what features this adds, as most screen readers don’t fully support ARIA, but it’s a good sign to see google continuing to adopt new and cutting edge accessibility technology.