Getting Online Low Vision: Online Searches

Are you interested in taking the big leap into searching the internet? Let's say you'd like to learn more about your eye condition. Just imagine trying to find a website on visual impairments in the billions of sites on the web. What a challenge. I'm Vikki Vaughan and today we'll learn about the most efficient ways to search the web for desired information.

This workshop is intended for users for low vision. If you use a screen reading program, be sure to check out our screen reading version of this workshop.

The best way to search the web is to use search engines. Some of the more popular search engines include Google, Yahoo, and Bing. We'll be using the world's most popular search engine, Google, to conduct our search today. Let's start from the NLS website and quickly navigate to our address bar with our keyboard shortcut of alt and the letter D.

If you'd like a refresher on using the address bar to navigate to a website, check out another video in this series, Website Basics. I'll type in Google and press the enter key.

Our next step is to locate the search field in the middle of our screen. Here we enter a word or phrase, also called a search query, that describes what we wish to find. Google works well with simple questions or statements such as show me information about macular degeneration. We have two methods we can use to enter our search query. We can either type it into the edit field or dictate it.

To dictate, we select the microphone located at the far right of our edit field. A new page opens and we see a prompt to speak now. We exit this method by clicking on the X in the top right corner of our browser window. Let's use the keyboard method. I'll start typing the phrase macular degeneration into the search field.

As we type our search query, Google offers a list of suggested topics. If we see our desired terms, we can click on the word or phrase to begin our search. The search query instructs Google to scour the vast number of websites on the web. In a split second, Google produced an index of over 14 million websites related to our topic. They are a mix of web pages, images and videos and most are displayed as links.

Links are always presented in blue. Once we select a given link, the color changes to purple. There's a really cool reason for this. By simply looking at the color of the link, we can tell if we visited a particular link in this browsing session. If it's been visited, it's purple. If not, it's blue.

Now for those of us with color deficiencies, we might see these as different shades of gray. Most browsers have extensions that allow us to customize link colors. By changing the link color, we can find colors that work best for us. Pretty cool, huh? As we scroll down the page, we see lots of websites that provide information regarding macular degeneration.

When we click on any of these links, we open a new website. Let's open the American Academy of Ophthalmologists website. Congratulations! You've just conducted your first web search. As we discovered in our basic webpage navigation workshop, we can move back through our visited web pages by clicking on the back arrow. Let's go back to our search results.

Google also offers advanced searches that allow us to fine-tune our search. Below our search field, we find a list of advanced search options. We can narrow our search to include only images, news, videos, books, and more that are all related to our search query.

For example, let's click on images. Here we see only images related to our search query. Now, let's move back to our Google homepage. Google is a lot more than just a search engine. We can use it to display stock quotes, measurement conversions, and simple translations. We can also use it to track packages using our tracking number. Search engines are amazing tools that provide us with the most effective means to search the web.

Today we explored the world's most popular search engine, Google. I'm Vikki Vaughan and I thank you for joining me. This is one in a series of workshops called Getting Online.