Paul Walsh, Segala wrote:
> Coupled with this, you could install our Firefox extension [1] that reads
> Content Labels. 
> 
> Users can see which sites claim conformance to accessibility guidelines in
> search results. That is, you don't have to enter a Web site to see if it's
> accessible, or making claims about accessibility conformance.
> 
> We place a little colour coded icon beside each search result.

[...]

 > [1] http://searchthresher.com

Looking at the source code for the extension shows that, for the time 
being, it only actually does anything when doing a Google search (based 
on the function below)

isValidSearchSite : function (aHref) {

         var name = aHref.match(/^http:\/\/www\.google\.[a-z\.]+\/search/i);
         if(name){
           //name[0].toLowerCase()
         return true;
         }

The output that the extension overlays on top of the Google search 
results is, ironically, not keyboard accessible (the icons can be tabbed 
to, but not activated other than with a mouse/pointer).

At this stage, due to the not very widespread use of the trustmarks, it 
usually happens that one does a Google search for verified or 
self-labelled sites only to be presented with an empty results page 
(empty because the extension has removed the non-verified or 
non-labelled search results from the page after it's been sent by 
Google), but with the results page counter/links at the bottom still 
there (as the extension only transforms the results one page at a time).

Lastly, in order to look for the potential presence of trustmark 
metadata, the extension executes a full page fetch for each result 
(potentially messing up stats collection on those pages).

It's a good idea, but I'd say it's something that would be far better 
handled at the server/search-engine end of things. As a proof of 
concept, though, it's interesting. And the concept of trustmark as 
RDF/metadata is far more appropriate than the original "Segala approved" 
trustmark (which was effectively just an image with a link to the 
certificate on the Segala site) I remember seeing back in 2006 on five 
sites (two Segala and three O2 sites). Once/if site owners actually 
start using this new trustmark metadata, the idea could prove useful.

P
-- 
Patrick H. Lauke
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Web Standards Project (WaSP) Accessibility Task Force
http://webstandards.org/
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