Google has also been working on some other accessibility-related features for Google Docs and Google Calendar.

“This fall, as classrooms fill with the hustle and bustle of a new semester, more students than ever will use Google Apps to take quizzes, write essays and talk to classmates,” says Google Accessibility technical lead T.V. Raman. “Yet blind students (like blind people of all ages) face a unique set of challenges on the web. Members of the blind community rely on screen readers to tell them verbally what appears on the screen. They also use keyboard shortcuts to do things that would otherwise be accomplished with a mouse, such as opening a file or highlighting text.”

The company has been working with advocacy organizations for the blind to make its products more accessible, and has already improved keyboard shortcuts and support for screen readers in Google Docs, Google Sites and Google Calendar. On the Gmail Blog, the company provides some examples of how screen readers and keyboard shortcuts have been improved specifically in Google Calendar:

• In your calendar lists, you can use the up and down arrow keys to navigate between your calendars. For each calendar in the list, you’ll hear its name and can use the spacebar to turn the calendar on or off. To remove a calendar from the list, use the delete key.
• In the agenda view, you can use the up and down arrow keys to move between events and use the left and right arrow keys to move between dates. To expand an event and expose the event details, press enter. To go to the event details page, type ‘e’. To remove an event, press delete. Although agenda view provides the best screen reader experience today, we are also working on improved accessibility for other views.
• In the guest list on the create/edit event page, you can navigate around using the up and down arrow keys. Use the spacebar to switch a guest’s status between optional and required. To remove a guest from the list, use the delete key.
• Additional keyboard shortcuts make it easier to use Google Calendar no matter which view or screen you’re on. Type ‘c’ to create an event, ‘/’ to start a search, and ‘+’ to add a calendar.

For a complete list os shortcuts and more information about screen reader functionality, you can find more info in Google’s help center.

JAWS, VoiceOver and ChromeVox are all supported by Calendars.

Google says it will continue to improve products for blind users in the weeks and months ahead.

According to those who spotted it, it appeared when they tried to insert files and images into Google Sites and Blogger. A screenshot is now making the rounds, showing that it is tied to Picasa, Maps, Google Docs, and YouTube. 

A spokesperson for the company told TechCrunch, "Oops… looks like someone pushed some code too quickly. It’s not quite ready for prime time yet but stay tuned!"

Something like this might come in handy when you want to share things. Incidentally, Google is also working on something else that’s not quite ready for prime time (and isn’t expected to be until the Spring – you know, that "social layer" Google is supposed to be adding to tie its products together. 

Any suggestion that this is related could only be considered speculation, but it’s something to consider. Another thing to consider is that Google is heavily trying to move people to the cloud. Google made an announcement recently that also connects the better part of Google’s services together through Google Apps. 

Something else that is also apparently not quite ready for prime time? Google’s Cloud-based operating system Chrome OS. This very likely has a lot to do with that. In the end all of these things are going to be connected in one way or another, I believe. 

Sarah Perez at ReadWriteWeb drops a name we haven’t heard in a while. "Wait, a Google storage product? Isn’t that Gdrive?" she writes. "Gdrive, the long-rumored Google competitor to Microsoft’s now 3+ years-old SkyDrive cloud storage service has never officially been revealed. But it was supposedly going to do something similar – tie together Google services into one interface."

"Isn’t that what Cloud Picker is doing?" she adds. "Actually, no – at least not to the extent of what Gdrive would have done. Cloud Picker only appears as a pop-up when you go to insert media into Blogger or Sites at this time, according to the forum posts…In other words, it’s a dialog box, not a service."

It certainly seems that way. There’s probably already more being made of this than is really necessary. It would appear to just be a function that could be applied to any Google offering the company wishes. If nothing else, it should make it easy to share different types of content in any given Google service. If you’re inserting a file, image, map, document, or YouTube video into something, you’re probably sharing it with somebody. Sounds social to me. 

Google is expected to launch a Chrome OS-based netbook on Tuesday.

"For example, if you have a restaurant site, you can embed Google Moderator on your suggestions page to get input from your restaurant patrons," explains Google Software Engineering Intern Eric Hysen.

Google provides steps for how to implement this here.

Google launched Moderator back in 2008 as a tool to help presenters prioritize questions for Q&A sessions. Since then, we’ve seen it in action a number of times, often from the company itself, but also in political settings, and other democratic-style events. Earlier this year, it was added to YouTube pages.

In May, Google launched the Google Moderator API, which means that developers can build tools around it.

Google recently added template themes to Google Sites.

Ok, perhaps it is a bit of an exaggeration to assume that this is going to completely put web designers out of work. Website templates have been around for years. It’s just that the potential of Google Apps to infiltrate more and more offices may lead to more widespread use of Google Sites.

Google has just launched a new template gallery for Google Sites, and it is public. Anyone can contribute templates by simply following these steps:

1. Open up the site you want to add to the gallery (the site must be published and you must be an owner to submit the site).

2. Select ‘More actions’, ‘Manage site,’ ‘General’, and chose ‘Publish this site as a template.’

3. Choose a template name, a category, enter a description and click ‘Submit template.’

While anyone can browse the gallery, businesses using Google Apps each have a private area where employees can share site templates with coworkers. Site templates can be used not only to build business websites, but intranets and more.

"The rate that businesses are adopting Google Sites has surpassed our expectations, and templates will make Sites even more useful by dramatically reducing the time it takes to set up collaborative workspaces like employee intranets, project tracking sites, team sites and employee profile pages," says Google Sites product manager Scott Johnston. "Templates let you quickly start a new site with pre-built content, embedded gadgets, page layouts, navigation links, theming and more."

Given that anyone can contribute templates to the gallery, it stands to reason that it will grow quickly and greatly. One knock against site templates has always been that they don’t make for a unique design. These days the chances of having a truly unique design are getting slimmer and slimmer as the web becomes more flooded with content. However, the more templates that are available, the less chances you have of actually coming across different sites that use the same one. Given that this is a Google product, it’s almost certain that it will get many contributions.

Do you think designers should worry about Google Sites? Share your thoughts here.

Related Articles:

> Google Exec: Docs Can Supplant Office In One Year

> API Makes Google Sites More Useful for Business

> Google Launches New Features for Sites

First up is the search giant’s offer to help out around Thanksgiving.  A post on the Official Google Docs Blog claimed, "A Google Site is a great way to let everyone know what to bring, provide directions, organize flight arrival times and even plan some post-Thanksgiving events, like football marathons or a little exercise to burn off those pumpkin pie calories."

This seems like OCD overkill, perhaps (plus there’s the issue of whether older family members know how to deal with the Web), but is harmless enough.

Then there’s the development that might do a measurable bit of good.  Over on the Inside AdWords blog, new holiday ad templates were announced.  They look nice, and could attract extra eyes and clicks, earning people some money just when they probably need it most.

Google’s almost sure to make more announcements as Thanksgiving and Christmas draw closer, too, so stay tuned.

Related Articles:

> More People Plan To Shop Online During The Holidays

> New Google Labs: Related Links And Script Converter

> New Google Chrome Release Includes Bookmark Sync

Right now there is only one supported version of the Sites Data API. The documentation, available here, includes a protocol guide, a reference guide, and language guides corresponding to the client libraries.

The API lets you do things like:

    -  Retrieve, create, modify, move, and delete pages, comments, attachments, and other content.
    – Review the revision history across the Site.
    – Monitor all add, modify, and delete activity for a Site.
    – Upload/download attachments and files.
    – Create customized gadgets for your users.

Google also names some specific ways the API could be useful to businesses. You can update Google Sites from 3rd party applications. You can migrate files and content from workspace apps. You can export Google Sites pages, edit them offline, and re-import the update content. You can export your sites for backup, easily monitor changes across your important internal and public sites from a single gadget, and you can push new content to any site on your domain (including sites created by individual employees).

  "Best of all, while this API is brand new, application developers will find it rather familiar – it is, after all, a Google Data API," says Anil Sabharwal of the Google Enterprise team. "And like our 16 other Google Data APIs, this one comes with all the standard protocol support around authentication and querying that you’d expect. You’ll find everything you need to get started on the Google Code pages, including links to documentation and sample applications."

Sabharwal also points to the open source import/export project on Google Code and SharePoint Move for Google Apps as applications that are already built on top of the Google Sites API. The former lets you export entire sites as static HTML, while maintaining the structure and page hierarchy, and the latter was developed for migrating data and content from Microsoft SharePoint to Google Sites.

If you make your own application, Google suggests promoting it in the Solutions Marketplace.

Google sites ranked as the most visited Internet property in the world at 854 million unique visitors age 15 and older in July. This is an increase of 18% over the last year. Nearly 75% of all Internet users visited Google sites, accounting for 9.4% of all time spent online. About one out of every ten minutes a person spends online, they are spending it on a Google site, according to comScore.

"It’s interesting that the dynamics of Google usage would be so similar in Brazil and India given that the two markets are on opposite sides of the world and quite different culturally from one another," said Alex Banks, managing director of comScore Latin America.

"As it turns out, there are interesting similarities between Brazil and India as emerging Internet markets," added Banks. "Google’s prevalence in these markets can perhaps best be explained by the fact that the time at which these markets really began to develop and flourish was around the same time that Google was becoming a major player in the search landscape. As a result, Google became the dominant Internet brand in these markets and its success appears to have bled from search into other areas of the web like social networking."

In July, 29.8% of total time spent online in Brazil was spent on Google sites, with India only slightly lower at 28.9%. The next highest global market was Ireland at 15.9%.