Baidu Launches Search Interface For Visual Impaired

Written by Luyi Chen on April 25, 2007
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Baidu MangdaoToday Baidu launched a search interface optimized for visual impaired people, called Mangdao. At first glance, it looks just identical to normal search. No wonder they had a post informing users not to expect too much difference between the new product with the normal search.

Baidu said they had organized several products most frequently used by visual impaired people, such as web, news, mp3 and postbar into a new sub-domain, and they are providing a more clean and smooth interface, which is supposed to be more friendly to screen reader software. Read more about the new product in the help.

Comparing this product with Google Accessible Search, we found that Baidu has just touched the surface of this area. Google not only provides a clean interface, but also re-ranks the search result according to their accessibility.

Lots of Chinese website are not at all accessible for visual impaired. This includes famous news portal like Sina, which should be totally discarded in accessible result. We expect Baidu’s move can raise the attention from more local websites. Baidu’s own simplified interface can be a good example.

One thing Baidu does better than Google is that they integrated several products, while Google seems to only have web search. Although Google launched the product in July last year, there isn’t many further improvements yet.

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