As a front-end web developer, I often hear the terms “findable”, “searchable”, “indexable” and “accessible” thrown around interchangeably. For many, they mean that the content can be accessed by a non-human, be it a screen reader or a search engine spider. On some level this is true, but there are several significant differences that are must not be overlooked.

For the sake of this discussion:

• Findable: how easily a site can be found when using a search engine (rankings). Yes, I realize that this term also refers to how easily content can be found once the user is on the site, but I’m ignoring that aspect of it for now…
• Searchable: how easily specific content within a site can be accessed when using a search engine (deep-linking)
• Indexable: how easily the content of a site may be retrieved and used in search engine results
• Accessible using AT: how easily someone using assistive technologies can use your site

(ShoeMoney.com has compiled a list of definitions for SEO from some industry experts, as well)

A site created completely in Flash or Flex may be findable thanks to the use of meta-data, but it is not indexable. With some diligent coding, information may be searchable, but this is no guarantee that it will be accessible.

(Not content with these descriptions? Have more to add? Please let me know what you think in the comments!)

As I’ve mentioned, my background is in accessibility: prior to coming to Resource, I worked on large subscription-based web applications. SEO was not a consideration at all. However, accessibility was. When I first came to Resource, I was eager to see how the two complemented and contrasted each other.

Overall, I see some overlap between the areas. However, their focus is different.

SEO is based on a page mentality - this is apparent in the search results that come up. Many common SEO techniques are applied at the page level, via adding meta tags or optimizing title tags. This is how a site that requires login, or is built using a technology like Flash or Flex, can appear in search results. A search engine can access meta information about the page, and use that to rank it. Findability relates to the notion of the discovery of the page itself.

A secondary notion is that of searchability. A web application may be found on google, but can the specific content that is being sought be retrieved? Searchability refers to the idea that site visitor can easily navigate to the specific information he’s searching for within the site, once the site itself has been discovered.

Both searchability and indexability deal with how elements of the page can be accessed, but arguably in different directions. Deeplinking into a flash movie may facilitate searchability, helping a site visitor dig into the site at a specific point. In contrast, indexability refers to the ability of a search engine spider to do a broad pull of content from the site.

Where SEO and Accessibility really start to diverge is when we move beyond the retrieval of content itself. A search engine spider is only interested in the data, so that the appropriate search result may be returned to an information seeker. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of a site visitor to navigate within an experience. The implications are significant: each interaction must be coded in a way such that a screen reader user can activate the change, and be notified of any changes that occur.

Another important distinction is the extent to which the site content is made available. A site may work to optimize or only make indexable certain aspects of the site. In contrast, accessibility refers to the ability of all content to be available and able to be engaged with.

As anyone who follows me on twitter knows, today I attended PodCamp Ohio. PodCamps are “usually free BarCamp-style community UnConferences for new media enthusiasts and professionals including bloggers, podcasters, YouTubers, social networkers, and anyone curious about new media.”

The first session I attended was “Managing Multiple Online Identities”, by Daniel Johnson Jr.. To start off the session, we went around the room and introduced ourselves, and shared what we wanted to get out of the session. This really set the tone for this most interactive of the sessions I attended. I hadn’t been sure what the backgrounds of the other attendees would be, and this gave me some good background. The first person to introduce herself was Lara Kretler, who’d just visited my blog and commented a few days ago!

My own interest in the session was the fact that I do consider myself to have two distinct brands online: my running self and my tech self. Two blogs, two twitter accounts.

The presenter gave us a little background on himself, I thought it was great that he commutes 60 miles one way from Cincy to Dayton, and therefore “has plenty of time to consume new media”. I was doing about 95 miles one way from Columbus to Dayton, so I knew exactly what he meant. I do miss my audiobooks..

As I mentioned, the session was very interactive. After a brief overview of the definitions of marketing vs PR vs advertising and branding, we had a discussion on the personal brand. In this room of early adopters, we discussed strategies about snapping up screen names on new services to ensure the integrity of the brand, versus only signing up for services you would be actively engaging with. (with the announcement today that the “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has decided to open up top-level domains to most any suffix we can imagine“, the challenges of retaining a firm hold on a specific word/brand may get a lot harder). I think it’s a personal ‘brand strategy’ decision that individuals must make.

We talked a bit about eliminating old brands or labels, and one individual pointed out that sometimes having a stale account was really just more time-consuming than it was worth. That wasn’t anything I’d really considered before. Thinking about ROI does help to drive home the fact that we really are branding and marketing ourselves online, and it may be worth figuring out the best use of our efforts.

Daniel shared some of his own techniques for managing these various elements. For each service he joins, he uses an email account specifically associated with that service: {servicename}@{domainname}. I thought that was a neat way to assess where traffic is coming from. When I signed up for utterz, I started receiving spammy messages right away, and it soured me on the service immediately. He also showed how he used Netvibes to have a dashboard for multiple twitter accounts. (A funny “small world” moment: he showed a screen capture of his Netvibes page, and some guy in the audience said “that’s my wife!”.) He also mentioned twhirl and digsby. Hurrah!

I will admit that I think I wanted a bit more of a philosophical discussion on why people would have and maintain multiple identities, and how to remain authentic while creating what is essentially a fragmented brand. But I suppose that is something that each ‘personal brand advocate’ needs to figure out for himself.

I was recently doing some research for a blog post I’m writing on screen readers vs SEO for the RI:Technology Blog. A 2005 blog post by Matt Cutts from Google entitled “SEO Mistakes: Unwise Comments” solicited many concerns about the use of hidden content being considered keyword spam.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons for hiding text from a sighted user on page load, and in many cases, this is simply a stylistic effect and the content will be surfaced as a result of user interaction. It is not about the use of the technique, but rather the misuse. The official Google Webmaster Guidelines do have a page dedicated to hidden text and links, but it also lists as a basic principle:

Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines. Don’t deceive your users or present different content to search engines than you display to users, which is commonly referred to as “cloaking.”

So how do we determine if a technique is being used appropriately? There has always been the old standby technique to disable CSS. Does the page still make sense, or is it littered with content not meant for human consumption? This would solve our concerns about “instructional” help for users of assistive technologies, and the suppression of content until the user opts to display it. (Indeed, it is a progressive enhancement best practice to have the content on the page and then hide it using javascript anyway, so that it is available even if JS is turned off.) This works fine for intelligent human users, but we all know that in GoogleLand, human reviews are NOT a desired goal.

So what about artificial intelligence as an option? Ever so slowly (yet steadily), we are moving forward in the area of natural language processing. What if AI and NLP were used to assess the semantics of page contents? When I access a website, I don’t expect to see a series of keywords. A human accessing a page is looking for content, not keywords describing the content. Some intelligence could be used to identify the overall syntax of the content, to ensure it’s legitimate “Content”.

Naturally, specific page elements would have to be accounted for. A list of navigation links may look suspiciously like keywords. This is where semantic markup comes into play, in particular some of the new tags proposed for HTML5 (nav or section, for example) or roles outlined in WAI-ARIA. A series of (internal) links would be expected in the nav element, but a collection of random words not appearing in proper syntactic form elsewhere in the document would be considered suspect.

Obviously, whenever there are rules, there will be people setting out to break them. But if we are cognizant of how these black hat techniques differ from legitimate best practices, surely we can filter them out as such. It’s a shame to penalize those who are honestly working to enhance the user experience, not cater to search engines.

Or, as Eric Meyer stated at the Spring Break conference last week, the best google juice is having good content so that everyone want to link to you. Do it right, and the hits will come organically..

On May 20 and 21st, I was working at the “lifestreaming/blogging” station at the social media cafe at the iCitizen conference. The conference itself had the standard speakers and panels, and the cafe was a supplementary opportunity for conference delegates to learn more about, well, social media. There were four stations: “lifestreaming/blogging”, “community conversations”, “new media entertainment”, and “mobile”. Resource Interactive employees manned each of the stations, showcasing some of these new and emerging sites and services.

Social Media Cafe

Originally uploaded by leigh_householder

For the lifestreaming station, we started with a targeted platform/service base of wordpress, tumblr, twitter, facebook, flickr, digsby and socialthing!. I mentioned in an earlier post that in preparation for this event, I was reflecting on my current online persona. This was because in order to cut down on some of the noise related to showcasing these tools, I wasn’t really myself during the conference. In order to show people how these tools worked, I was officially “iCitizen04″ for awhile. That is, I would show people how to use these different tools (and how they connected) using the moniker iCitizen04. As it was, there was PLENTY of online iCitizen buzz, and I didn’t want to inundate my regular followers with our test posts. (According to summize.com, we were actually the #1 trending topic on twitter for much of the day!)

#1 trending topic on twitter
Originally uploaded by icitizen04

Overall, it was really interesting to chat with individuals, trying to figure out what the buzz was all about. Some folks were already well-established twitterers, while others were just catching a glimmer of what this service could do for them.

In the true nature of lifestreaming, looking back at the output from the conference tells a bit of the story about the event itself. the icitizen04 tumblog pulls in tweets and photos, as well as other posts, pictures and videos I posted as I spoke to different participants at the event. We looked at the services themselves and I also liked mention Summize and Twist (http://twist.flaptor.com) to illustrate how brands could use twitter as a very simplified version of buzz metrics. Searching for a brand on flickr or youtube was a good way to see what sort of user-generated content was already out there, and in both cases, identify some of those potential brand advocates (or see what sort of risk mitigation needs to take place!).

I was always very happy to introduce folks to digsby, which is an Uber-IM Client. It supports instant messaging, multiple web mail services, facebook and twitter. You can send and receive updates right from your desktop. It was a great service to be able to illustrate the ease at content pushes and updates.

Overall, I was really excited by what we were able to pull off during the course of the event. I have some more thoughts on the event itself, but I just wanted to specifically call out the social media cafe aspect of it.

Oh, and I HAVE to share the video some of my co-workers pulled together:

iCitizen Video from Mark Hillman on Vimeo.

In addition to this blog, I’ve maintained one related to running at http://runlikeagrrl.livejournal.com for several years (my oldest listed post is my review of my first marathon in October 2004). Livejournal was a great platform at the time - it incorporated a notion of friending that is still more robust than what most social networking sites currently offer. However, it also has its limitations. I was a paid member for awhile, so I am acutely aware of the features I currently don’t have access to. As well, many of the running blogs I read are not on the livejournal platform, so the privacy rules don’t really apply (not to mention, I don’t really have any need to set any posts to anything but “public”).

A few weeks back I had an email exchange with Melanie McBride, who also works in new media and is a runner. We were discussing what we posted to our twitter accounts, how we managed those two different aspects of our personalities and interests. At that time I was using my twitter account exclusively for work and technology purposes. More recently, however, in a bit of a social experiment for work, I’ve been looking at redefining myself online. My “new” (temporary) profile is a summary view, so it combines the different aspects of me. And I actually like it! My running journal posts themselves (with the exception of race reports) are generally shorter than those on this blog. They seem perhaps better suited to microblogging. As well, I’ve run into several limitations on livejournal in terms of not being able to add certain widgets (my logyourrun stats) to my sidebar. By hosting my own journal, I’ll be able to add and modify at will.
The final straw was a question I had this morning about multiple twitter accounts. I hadn’t really considered doing so, since I figured the ability to post to either would be challenging to manage (this is something I’m grappling with now with my work experiment). However, it appears that the twhirl AIR app already manages this, and a survey by Techcrunch France found that 53% of the folks surveyed had multiple accounts. A silly tipping point, but it is one nonetheless.

And so I introduce: Go the Distance, at www.afhill.com/gothedistance. I’ve ported over all my LJ posts (losing the tags in the process), and things are ready to go!

(from the accessibility_sig mailing list)

As part of a TCDD funded project called AccessWorks, Knowbility has been able to hire interns with disabilities to perform web site accessibility assessment, to research employment and disability related topics on the web, and to blog about their experiences. While our interns have found a great deal of documentation out there about barriers to accessing information online, much less is available about how people with disabilities are producing content and successfully posting to the web. Expect to hear from them about that and other related topics.
Check it out at www.universallydesigned.net

One excerpt, posted by Desiree: “This is my first experience with blogging, although I have read lots of other people’s stuff. I am totally blind, using jaws and have experienced a few slight barriers. First off, I hope I am putting this text in the correct area, because jaws doesn’t tell me much about where I am. I also found that when viewing posts, I have to scroll past all of the top text to see the post’s content.”

I am drafting an article for the RI:Technology blog on Screen readers and Search Engines, and was reviewing a paper a colleague wrote about Search. He mentioned sIFR as a technique “to bring content to search engines”. I asked another colleague about this, as I’d always just considered sIFR as a “stylability” technique.
We started talking about the weight factor of search engines, whether content written to a page and then sIFRized would be weighted more heavily than the alt text of an image. I hadn’t really thought about that before. I then mentioned a habit I have of placing images within a heading tag, i.e.
<h1><img alt="descriptive text" /></h1>. Toby asked if this really worked, if the alt text would be considered the header. I realized that I’d never really verified it before.

So I took a quick look at an example using FANGS, and learned that alternate text, really isn’t. Turning off images would cause the alt text to display as the appropriate heading level, but at least for FANGS, the alt text does not get surfaced as the heading (the text should show up before the colon in the screen shot below)

Now, obviously FANGS is an emulator, and it’s possible that a screen reader would access that alt text. But this gave me something to consider..