According to Google’s TV Raman, their top two ‘accessible’ services are their main web search and the new Google labs accessible search. The rationale?

Web search: Result pages include headers to delineate logical sections

Right, that’s good and all, but it doesn’t really excuse the dozens of tables that have no summaries does it? And headers really don’t magically make a page accessible.

And as for the new Accessible search:

Accessible Search: Promotes results that are accessible.

I haven’t played with this search enough to see if it does promote accessible results (I’m sure it’s a good service), but again, Google’s own code is a mess. It’s better than the main Google search, but still has huge amounts of inaccessible code.

You should never claim your site is accessible. Code for it as much as you can, test it as much as you can and show you conform to WCAG, but never claim it’s ‘accessible’. And even if you do, at least make sure it passes some automated tests: unlike Google, who barely scrape in at Priority 1.

The WYSIWYG-style interface is of the usual high standard you’d expect from Google — AJAX rich and very easy to use. There are warnings about putting your email online (“Be careful. Remember that any time you include an email address on a web page, nasty spammers can find it too”) are nice — as are the encouragements to check links before you put them in.

I’m looking at these features from the point of view of what Google perceives its target customers to be: basic users who are making their first steps into web publishing. This may include those who may not know what a blog is, yet or how to share photos online, or those who just want to set up a good old fashioned ‘homepage’. However, with the boom in community-centric online services (Blogger, Myspace, Flickr) I’m really not seeing how this service is going to really impact in any serious way — unless Google has something else up its sleeves for this one.