About Accessibility

Google’s Wonder Wheel – I wonder where is accessibility

Google’s wonder wheel is a flash product that hit the market in 2009. This is a good SEO tool and helps in building keywords. However, when checked for accessibility it showed some drawbacks.

Google wonder wheel showing accessibility search resuts

Get the wonder wheel

Google wonder wheel location

The wonder wheel can be found using the steps mentioned below.

• Go to Google’s homepage and type what you are looking for. The search will return results that can be viewed in a number of different presentations – visual forms.

• The left side of the page has a lot of options.

• Click the one that says wonder wheels.
• Sometimes, these options do not show. In such cases, click the More button found on the left hand side.

•When you click the wonder wheel option on the left side of the page the search results are returned in the form of a wheel that has your search query as the center and the important results as out going links.

The wonder wheels are good visual search options and are being tested by Google at the moment. The sphere keeps on building links to other spheres as you keep going deep into your search. Thus, moving forward with your search it very easy.

Accessibility and wonder wheel

When the WAVE toolbar was used to judge the accessibility of the wonder wheel it did not prove to be promising.

The structure – order section of the toolbar was used. The results showed incorrect tab – ability in the flash wonder wheel. In addition, there is no tab-ability in the wonder wheel i.e. there is no cursor movement between the center sphere and the spokes of the sphere.

Moreover, when JavaScript is disabled the wonder wheel disappears from the screen. However, the good point is there exists a <NOSCRIPT> element for the java disabled browsers.

All browsers cleared the test, except for IE8.

The wonder wheel is the Flash product. The flash products are said to be inaccessible. However, work is being done to achieve high level of accessibility as compared to HTML pages. Flash players are required to be included to view flash files on a web page.

There is no back button functionality if you are using a keyboard i.e. backspace button (Pc’s) and delete button (Mac’s). If you are using a mouse, clicking on the back button works fine.

However good the product is it lacks somewhere in the accessibility test.