Search Engines, Metadata and Accessibility“How to make your web pages prominent”

Agenda

What will we cover today?

• Search Engines• Metadata• Accessibility

– Why?– What?– How?– Demonstration

• Questions

Search Engines

What is a Search Engine?

• Software that enables users to search the Internet or Intranet using keywords.

• A program that acts as a catalogue for the Internet or Intranet.

• A web search tool that automatically visits websites (using crawlers), records and indexes them within its database, and generates results based on a user's search criteria.

Popular Search Engines

Search Engines

How do they work?

• Web CrawlingAutomated “spider” that follows links and then analyses content in pages to determine what should be indexed. Metadata is very important in this phase.

• IndexingData about web pages are stored in an index database for use in later queries. Some search engines, such as Google, store all or part of the source page (referred to as a cache) as well as information about the web pages.

• Searching & ResultsThe engine looks up the index and provides a listing of best-matching web pages according to its criteria. The usefulness of a search engine depends on the relevance of the result set it gives back.

Search Engines

University Search Engine Statistics

• The University uses Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003

• ~88,000 web pages are crawled every day

• The crawl starts at 6:00am every day

• The crawl takes ~ 20 minutes to complete

• The search engine is currently crawling:

– www.unisa.edu.au

– www.unisanet.unisa.edu.au

– www.library.unisa.edu.au

Search Engines

How SharePoint ranks pages

1. Document or Page Title

<title>Test Page</title>

2. Metadata keywords

<meta name="keywords" content=“test page, testing">

3. Metadata description

<meta name="description" content=“This is a test.”>

4. Content

5. Frequency of search words in entire document or page

Search Engines

When I search I don’t get good results …

Four possible causes:

• No ContentThere is no content that matches your search query.

• Bad search phrasesYou are putting in really bad search phrases!

• Bad search engineThe search engine isn’t very good, or isn’t searching the content that it should be.

• Bad contentThe content that you want exists, but the metadata and text within the page is not optimised for a search engine.

Metadata

Metadata Information

• Metadata is ‘data about data’.

• The use of metadata is included in the World Wide Web Consortium's accessibility recommendation because metadata makes documents easier to find and use.

• Metadata enhances accessibility, whilst also enhancing usability for everyone.

• Important web metadata:– Page Title– Keywords and Description

Metadata

Page Title

• The page Title of an HTML document is a descriptive name that appears in the title bar of the web browser when the browser is displaying that page.

• It also appears in bookmarks, your history file listed in 'go' or 'history' menus, and is used by search engines. It is essential therefore that each page has a clear, meaningful title indicating its contents.

Example: School of Computer and Information Science, UniSA

Metadata

Keywords

• The Keywords field should convey the subject matter of the webpage or resource.

• Keywords should be expressed as words or phrases that describe the theme or content of the webpage or resource. Try to imagine the terms someone outside your area would use in a search engine to find information on your web pages. As a guide:

– always choose the most significant and unique words – do not repeat keywords unnecessarily – use both upper and lower case letters for initialisms and/or acronyms – include synonyms, acronyms, alternative word endings, different spellings (eg color/colour; Student and

Academic Services/SAS)

Example: SWSP, School of Social Work and Social Policy, swsp, social work and social policy

Metadata

Description

• The Description field should contain a brief textual description of the content of the webpage or resource. This may include abstracts or summaries, or content descriptions.

• Use complete sentences and good grammar; some search engines will use this summary in your displayed search results.

Example: Home page for University of South Australia, located in Adelaide, South Australia

University Search Demo

Demonstration on how to implement metadata in FrontPage

University Search Demo

Demonstration comparing pages with metadata and those without

Web Accessibility

What is Web Accessibility?

• Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can use the Web.

More specifically, Web accessibility means that people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and interact with the Web, and that they can contribute to the Web. Web accessibility also benefits others, including older people with changing abilities due to aging.

• “The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”

-Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web

Web Accessibility

The aim for the University

• Provide access to all UniSA web pages to the broadest range of community members

• Creating web pages that support the use of assistive technologies

– screen readers

– alternative keyboards

– text enlargers

Web Accessibility

Who is supported by Web Accessibility?

• People with disabilities

– vision, eg. blindness, colour blindness

– hearing, eg. deafness, reduced hearing capacity

– physical, eg. paralysis

– cognitive, eg. dyslexia

• People in rural and remote areas

• People using old hardware, software or with technical limitations

• Older people

Web Accessibility

Why are some web sites difficult to use?

Many current websites use design, text, images, graphics and scripts in ways that make it difficult to use – this makes them “inaccessible”:

• no text alternatives for information presented via pictures, audio files, etc.– a screen reader is unable to describe the image

• use of absolute rather than relative sizing of fonts – prevents users from resizing text to a larger size

• using colour-only elements to convey information– users with color blindness cannot access information

• web forms requiring the use of a mouse for navigation – prevents users from using a keyboard

• web pages that require scripts in order to work– people that have scripting disabled will have difficulties

Web Accessibility

How do we determine if a page is accessible?

A set of guidelines exist called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines; published by W3C:

• Priority 1 (16 checkpoints) = “must” (will be completely inaccessible to some users if not met)– provide a text equivalent for every non-text element eg. images, symbols, animations– for data tables, add row and column headers– provide an auditory description of the visual track of a multimedia presentation

• Priority 2 (30 checkpoints) = “should” (will be very difficult to access by some users if not met)– foreground and background should provide sufficient contrast– clearly identify the target of each link– provide a site map or table of contents

• Priority 3 (19 checkpoints) = “may” (will be slightly difficult to access by some users if not met)– expand each abbreviation or acronym where it first occurs– enable different types of searches for skill levels and preferences

Web Accessibility

Putting it into practice

(Demonstration of making an accessible web page for the CW)

JAWS Demonstration

Demonstration of screen-reader software (JAWS)

JAWS Software link - http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_products/software_jaws.asp

• Good – http://www.unisa.edu.au

• Interesting - http://www.transport.sa.gov.au/index.asp

Questions?

Further Information

• Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

– http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

• UniSA Online Accessibility Action Plan

– http://www.unisa.edu.au/footer/accessibility/actionplan/default.asp

• How to make accessible content with Frontpage

– http://www.webaim.org/techniques/frontpage/

• Corporate Web Metadata Help

– http://www.unisa.edu.au/wag/construct/metadata.asp

• Web Authoring Guide

– http://www.unisa.edu.au/wag/

• Bobby Test

– http://webxact.watchfire.com/