This year I once again was able to attend the Google I/O conference. It was once again an incredible experience and I took away a lot of valuable information. Here’s some of my favorite sessions:
Scaleable Structured Markup
Google searches can show different snippets of a page for different types of content. For instance on a product page, Google can display the number of reviews and the price. Google uses rich snippets (special HTML markup) on the page to build these. One such snippet Google can display on from any page is a breadcrumb. I’ve already changed our base templates to begin using this new markup for breadcrumbs to improve our results in Google searches.
Creating Accessible Interactive Web Apps using HTML5
Our newer designs (like the Academics page) are using more and more dynamic content on the page. While we strive to make everything accessible, the methods for making such dynamic content truly accessible haven’t been well understood. This session described some very small and easy changes which drastically increase the accessibility of any such pages.
The presenters also demoed some free accessibility extensions for Chrome, including a fully featured screen reader.
Resources
The Secrets of Google Pac-Man: A Game Show
The creative lead for Google doodles and a programmer teamed up to give background on many of the most popular interactive doodles. They talked about how they want a “cool” user experience, but that it can’t get in the way of the major functions of the page.
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