2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility

Seminars@Hadley

Yahoo for Web Accessibility

Presented by Victor Tsaran

Moderated by Billy Brookshire

February 24, 2011

Billy Brookshire Welcome to Seminars@Hadley. I’m Billy Brookshire. I’ll be your Moderator today. Today we’re going to be talking about web Accessibility. Your presenter is Victor Tsaran who’s the Senior Accessibility Program Manager for Yahoo. If you check out the web a little bit, and YouTube, you’re also going to find some videos of Victor as a very accomplished jazz guitarist. So be sure you check out that aspect of Victor also.

Victor so that again, I don’t waste any more of your time, I’m going to turn the microphone over to you. Ladies and gentlemen let’s welcome Victor Tsaran

Victor Tsaran

Hello everyone. I was very happy to see that there was such a huge interest in this particular webinar. I don’t do many of those so I hope it’s going to work just fine. I usually like to speak in front of people because that way you get lots of interaction and things like that. So we’ll see how that’s going to work today. So again, thanks so much everyone for joining and hopefully after I do a bit of talking you’ll get a bit to ask some questions and we’ll get the conversation in a bit more lively mode than just me talking, because that can get.

Okay, so I guess I’ll do a bit of an introduction to the topic and, it is a bit of a challenge to do this because I’m not exactly sure what backgrounds you guys all come from; what is your experience with the web, is it good or is it bad. But I’m hoping today to dispel some of the questions or some of the problems you may have with the web by sort of drawing a picture of where we have been with the access with the internet, where we are now, and most importantly where we’re heading with regards to it.

So those of you who may remember the screen reader accessibility back in the 90s when the web was starting, things were quite simple at that time because web pages were much simpler. People would put maybe a couple of pictures and there was

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 2 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility some text. So for the most part screen readers in particular, or as a specific technology, didn’t have that many challenges regarding the web. I mean there were some challenges because there were no standards but in general, people could navigate just fine and get to the places where they wanted to get to.

Probably I would say in the middle of 2000 we started getting to this whole new wave of web accessibility, or actually the way on the web in general called Web 2.0. That term may be familiar to some of you. Those of you who don’t know what Web 2.0 means, you really shouldn’t worry about the term. What it really means, just to put it into sort of main stream perspective, all of you guys have heard about Facebook and Twitter and blogging and Micro- blogging and Flicker and pictures and all of these things, so Web 2.0, really to put it in a simpler way, it’s a more social web.

It’s a web where you don’t just go and you look for something and you consume something or you go and read the news or you go and read a blog. So basically we’re now in this new web where you don’t just read things but you actually get to interact. And I think part of the challenge was, as usual with assisted technologies, we haven’t been successful in catching

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 3 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility up on some of these things. Part of the challenge was because the web is an always evolving thing. It’s like with everything, kids grow into adults, so does the web.

The web started out being very simple and it keeps growing. That presents a challenge to both users and developers. So when we, for example if you’ve ever developed things, we not only constantly have to battle with how to make this an accessible to work for users, we have to also battle with things like how do you make this work on multiple browsers. There’s Google Chrome. There’s Firefox. There’s Internet Explorer. There’s Safari on the Mac.

So on top of this all, the challenge is not even just making it work in general; the challenge is also how to make that stuff accessible and meaningful to the users that for example are older users. Obviously if you’re a young kid you’re willing to try things out and you’re willing to jump through certain obstacles to figure out how to make this Facebook thing or the Twitter thing work or whatever it is, or the Yahoo thing.

But obviously people who have started using computers either back in the 80s or in the 90s or they may have gotten disability quite recently and using

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 4 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility technology for them is a challenge to begin with. Those are the users who really have difficulty getting adjusted to the new web because as I said, it has lots of challenges, it has lots of inconsistencies and it requires a little bit of work on the side of the user to kind of figure out how to navigate the space.

So, where we’re heading – we’re heading into…how should I put it so as not to scare you guys? I think we’re heading into a more challenging web. We’re heading into places where it will require the user to be a bit more advanced of a user. In some ways we have gone into mobile area where things have become slightly easier because there’s less things to worry about on the screen. There’s obviously fewer pieces of content that you have to go through.

As far as the web is concerned, things are getting more crowded, things are getting more complicated and on top of this all, again, we have assisted technology trying to catch up with what Google’s of this world and Yahoo’s of this world are trying to accomplish. So for example, on the Yahoo home page, we’ve shown you a bunch of things, obviously Yahoo is known mostly as a company that delivers news, sports, finance. We also have been known as a company that does mail. That probably moved, I’m not sure how many people these days use Yahoo

Mail; lots of young people use Gmail. More of our loyal customers still continue using Yahoo Mail.

In Asia Yahoo Messenger and Yahoo Mail are still very big. So it really depends on the region, different regions have followed different trends. But in general, Yahoo is known as a company that is specializing in delivering content. So content has been our strength and as I already pointed out earlier, making regular content accessible is probably not as much of a challenge. I mean, how challenging can it be to make a news article accessible? You make sure that you provide text description for pictures. You probably make sure that the text flows so that if you use arrow keys or whatever technology you use to magnify the text, you still would be able to read the news.

Now, the problem is when we get into multimedia, which is for example in the middle of the news article we may want to put a video, or we may want to put a link to another related article. We may want to give a user ability to Tweet something or to “share” it with their friends on Facebook if they like the article. Now that means we have to introduce other things into the news article which, for example for screen reader users, disrupts the flow of the reading.

So we have to make sure that theses widgets will work so the user for example understands okay, what follows next is a widget that allows them to share this article with their Facebook friends or put it on Twitter, or maybe even put it on their blog or whatever it is. So in that respect we have done lots of work with Yahoo News and Yahoo Sports. And pretty much most of our content properties, they have gone through a series of improvements to make sure.

Now, as I pointed out earlier, we do still have a problem where users sometimes get confused because there’s just so much of everything on the screen that it does require a bit of learning to get used to the page before you can continue browsing and feel comfortable with the content; before you can say “Okay, now I think I get it. I understand what these guys are trying to do.”

So in that respect we try to be out there; we’re on Facebook, we’re on Twitter, we’re meeting with users wherever we can to educate the users about the work we do. Because it’s just like with every product, you can make it only as accessible as you can. The rest of the work falls on us to make sure that the users actually understand what accessibility features are built into our products and how they can best take advantage of them.

To that effect, we actually launched a blog called Accessibility.yahoo.com. And on this blog you can find various interesting content that our observations are how people with disabilities use assisted technologies and you can find links to some of the tutorials we’ve put together for the users. It is a very new effort. The blog has been out only for a couple of months. But I’m hopeful that it keeps growing and the more users know about it, the more effective and the more useful it will become for the disability community.

So I started talking about the home page briefly so I’m going to get back to it, because this has been one of the most challenging projects we’ve been working on so far. With the home page we do have things like “today’s story”, “breaking news”, and you have other stuff like what people are searching for, which we call what’s “trending”. If you go there you can find out if people are searching, I don’t know, whatever news is currently buzzing, and that’s what we will be displaying. Some of the most popular searches you would see on the home page.

In addition to that, we’ve introduced an ability for people to, for example, view their email right on the Yahoo home page. You have to set it up once and

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 8 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility once you do that you don’t actually, you can quickly go and preview and say “Okay, I wonder if my friend responded to my email.” You could do that right from the home page. Or you could put your Twitter feed, if you’re using Twitter, or Facebook feed if you’re using Facebook, or both on your home page and you could quickly preview that without having to go to either of these sites.

Now of course, the challenge again was how to actually make that stuff accessible. How do you make sure, of course again, screen readers being the most demanding of assisted technologies, how do you make that stuff work with a screen reader. We have put a video which I could share with you Billy, or we could have notes attached to this particular seminar where we could put links to these videos so people could actually view if they’re interested to know how we have done these things and how users can take advantage of all these features.

So the home page has become more than just your regular list of news or list of stories. It has become more of an interactive page. There’s less of that on other sites, such as finance, but those of you who may have gone to the Yahoo Finance site may have noticed we have done a lot of improvements to these sites specifically for screen readers. Now, depending

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 9 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility on how advanced of a user you are, if you use headings for example, to browse through web pages or if you use other features of your assisted technology software to jump quickly to different parts of the page, you may or may not notice these features immediately.

If you are more of an intermediate user you’re probably going to quickly see “Okay, yeah this is pretty easy. I can quickly jump.” If you’re a beginner user, I do encourage you guys to get a bit more familiar with your assisted technology tool because again, as a company that develops sites for everyone, there’s only as much as we can do. We try to make page standards compliant, but unfortunately we have to put a lot of the power in the hands of the user to try to figure out how to take advantage of some of the things we put on the page.

And just for your information, I myself can’t see as well. So I know exactly what pains some screen readers have to go through when browsing the web. We do have other people who have disabilities working for us and they help us test things. So we clearly understand the pains that people have to go through. But we also have to understand that the web is moving forward and that sometimes things don’t just work as perfectly as we would like them to be.

Well just like everything in the world right? Nothing is ever perfect.

There are also things that, you know again, you develop websites for hundreds of millions of people who come to you every day, and we have over 600 million users visiting Yahoo network every day. So we do have to take into account a lot of things; performance being one of them. We have to make sure that no matter where you are, whether you’re in Texas, you’re in Tennessee or you’re in India you still should get a very fast load. You shouldn’t be waiting for pages to load.

Obviously all of these things have to go into account and accessibility obviously is one of them. How do you make pages user friendly? How do you make them accessible? And most important of course, how do you make them interesting? I want to talk a little nit about mobile phones, because I think this is where some of the web is moving. Again, I have no idea how many of you guys use things like iPhones or any kind of mobile phone, but it is important to realize that people have now an alternative to the web.

So is you find that the web is a bit too complicated for you to use, I’m happy to say that with the introduction of mobile phones, specifically accessible mobile

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 11 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility phones like Apple’s iPhone or Nokia’s if you use a talk screen reader or Zoom’s or other assisted technology, you can access the web on the mobile phone. And the good thing about accessing web on the mobile phone is that oftentimes you can find the websites have been designed for mobile experience. This means that they’re usually less crowded. They’re usually more accessible.

I could easily give you examples of websites that are harder to navigate when you are on your desktop, but they’re much easier to navigate if you access them via your mobile phones. And Facebook has been one of those. If you go to, there’s many people who use m.facebook.com, which is the mobile version of the Facebook; similarly you’ve got m.twitter.com which is the mobile version of the Twitter site.

You also have m.yahoo.com, which is a mobile site of Yahoo where you get less things and it doesn’t have probably all the interactive features you get on the web, but if all you care about is to read your latest news and you don’t really care about fancy stuff then you can just go to the mobile site and you can find pretty much all the same information there. At least as far as the content is concerned.

If you are more of an advanced user and use something like iPhone where you can download these little programs called “apps” then you can be even more powerful of a user because you get access to the interrupted features without being overloaded with too much content. And so this is the future of the web.

I think the web is going to be moving in two main directions – the web in general as such the web on your desktop, such as you access with your Firefox browser or Safari or IE, Internet Explorer, will get probably more crowded and more interactive. There are emerging standards that will help us developers of the websites to make web more accessible, but obviously we will have to work with assisted technology to make sure that they take advantage of the features we develop.

And the other direction in which the web is going to go or is going already is the mobile space. And for the reasons I already described a couple of minutes ago, this is one of the preferred methods I think for people with disabilities because it’s a device you can carry in your pocket and you get the same power if not more actually with your mobile device because it’s always with you.

And so we see these two trends emerging. I am not in a position to say which one is going to prevail because I don’t know, nobody knows. But just to give you a quick factoid, the mobile space has been growing amazingly. I mean within the last two years the number of mobile users has grown to 62% or 65% across the globe. So it is telling us something about where we’re moving in general with the web. So who knows?

But this is just a quick overview of where we’re going and all I can say is that Yahoo is in the middle of the evolution. We are watching very closely where the web is going and we are present on mobile platforms, we’re present on the bigger web and obviously we want to hear from users; I can’t stress this enough. We have accessibility.yahoo.com blog. We have a Facebook and Twitter feed where you guys can find us. We want to hear about the problems people are encountering because no one is perfect. We’re definitely not perfect.

So we realize that while certain things work for some users, they may not work for other users and we are happy to work with those unhappy users to make them happy, because that’s essentially the goal. I mean for me personally, because I want to be able to see happy users myself, just as I am as happy of a

So that’s just a quick overview. I think I want to open it up to questions because I try to speak fast and I may have missed some things. So hopefully those questions will help us reveal the things that I have missed, the things I have not said, or things that I have said but perhaps didn’t elaborate enough on. So, I guess Billy, you can just open it up to questions.

Billy Brookshire Alright. We’re ready for any question out there folks. Victor, before we start, there are a couple of questions that came in in the chat room that I wanted to pass your way. You might want to field those and then we’ll just open it up to the microphone. Goldie answered one of them – the question was “What is the name of that blog for accessibility that you mentioned that Yahoo has?” And Goldie wrote down the address is www.accessibility.yahoo.com for those of you who didn’t get that in the chat room.

The other question Victor is about creating a social work or Messenger type system for deaf/blind persons. Is there anything like that that you know of in the works?

Victor Tsaran I just wanted to make a quick note that you don’t actually need www in the blog address. Just to save you some typing you can simply use accessibility.yahoo.com. The second thing about the Messenger, actually I would like to know more about what is the person trying to – I guess what the question really is. We currently have Yahoo Messenger which works really well with screen readers. I didn’t, to be honest with you, I haven’t tested it with Braille display so I’m hoping it’s going to work because we tried to sort of make it accessible on all fronts. But I’m not exactly sure how would a Messenger for deaf/blind persons be different from a regular Messenger. So pardon my ignorance but I’d like to be taught.

Caller It could be Braille or it could be (inaudible 00:22:45) Braille output or it could be large print for sight impaired people I guess.

Billy Brookshire Thank you very much for that comment. We’ve got another question here Victor, I haven’t heard any more from the person related to the Messenger – oh here it is. “What if you have software that a

Messenger doesn’t work well with? Is it accessible with no mouse?” That’s one question. Another question, “How can we make a screen reader friendly?” And the last question from Marisan in Liberia, South Africa, she says “How secure is it to visit a website via a mobile phone? Are mobile phones virus protected?”

And folks, we seem to have lost Victor off of the screen here for a second. I guess he’s probably trying to sign back in. Bear with me…

Caller Hi, the person about the mobile sites on the mobile phones – you can download, it’s a virus protection and it’s free, it’s called Lookout. And that’s what I have on mine and I haven’t had no problems.

Caller If you’re blind how do you use one of those mobile phones as far as the keyboard goes? It seems to me that things are so small they’re just hard to even find the keyboard on it.

Caller Mine has a regular keyboard like we use with the computer and I also have the software called Talks

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 17 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility and other software in my phone that any time I hit a key it spells it out, it reads it back to me, it will make corrections; it does everything for me. Also, I can talk into it and it will text message someone or pull up a site that I need and will speak back to me.

Caller Do you have an iPhone?

Caller No I do not. I have a Samsung Epic 4G.

Caller You said Epic 4G. So that software Talks, can you spell that for me?

Caller Okay. I have a Samsung S and it’s an Epic and it’s a 4G and it handles what’s called Talks and it will handle Talks.

Billy Brookshire And folks, we’ve got victor back to us. I want to put him back on the microphone so you can get the benefit of his experience. Victor I’m turning the microphone over to you.

Victor Tsaran Okay. I apologize. My browser has crashed on me. I’m not sure at what point you lost me guys, but I was just saying that I wasn’t exactly sure what a Messenger for a deaf/blind, how different it would be for someone who’s blind. I mean I understand for deaf people, but for deaf/blind people…so I’d like to be taught in that respect. We can either take this offline so as not to hold the conversation, but I’d love to hear more.

Caller A Messenger that can be used that we were taught at school to use for the blind was Windows Live. Hey seem to have everything that we need for the blind as far as Messenger goes.

Victor Tsaran Yeah we do have Yahoo Messenger, which pretty much works the same way as Windows Live. There’s multiple messengers right now. AOL Messenger is great in terms of accessibility. We do have choices. So check it out, the latest Yahoo Messenger 11 and let me know what you find.

Caller I have a question Mr. Victor. My problem is ever time I go to go onto the Yahoo Mail my JAWS won’t read my inbox.

Victor Tsaran That’s a very cool question. Actually I’m wondering which version of JAWS you’re using, is it 10?

Caller Yes, I’m using 10 and it’s upgraded.

Victor Tsaran So it has been upgraded to 12, right?

Caller No sir, but I’ve just had one problem after another since I’ve gotten it.

Victor Tsaran Got it. Okay, so let me just quickly clear up – we do have two versions of Yahoo Mail. One is called Mail Classic and the other one is called Yahoo Mail, just simply Yahoo Mail. So the Yahoo Mail in non-classic version, in fact we do discourage screen reader users from using it because it’s very old and it has not been designed with any type of accessibility; well there’s a very little bit of it, but I would not even suggest users go there.

So first of all you do want to make sure that you’re using the Classic version and you’d know that because on top it will say things like Yahoo Mail Classic or something like that. If you don’t see that then make sure you switch to the Classic Mail first. There’s a link at the top that should say switch to Yahoo Classic Mail.

The other thing I wanted people to know is that unfortunately JAWS 10 had some bugs which they’re aware and they have fixed since version 10. Well that doesn’t really help too many people who didn’t upgrade to 10, but that’s where we are. With version 10 unfortunately there were a bunch of problems that they were aware of. Even with Classic Mail people had problems.

So that’s probably what I can say right now. If you do have some specific problems can you please get in touch with us and I’ll be happy to figure out how we can help you with that okay? Because probably if you have a problem then other people may have it too, so it would be great to know what the issues are before I can give a full…

Caller I’m using JAWS 12 with Yahoo Classic and it works really well.

Billy Brookshire Victor, we had a question come in that’s something I’m sure you’ll want to cover. And it comes from your friend Tom and he’s asking about the Accessibility Lab which I know is something you wanted to visit. Would you tell us a little bit about how you’re using the Accessibility Lab to educate the industry as well as users in general?

Victor Tsaran Thanks for asking me this. I was definitely planning to address it, but of course as I thought, I skipped it for some reason. So, people do ask how do you actually, in a big company like Yahoo, how do you go about educating people around you about accessibility. Because you know, one of the big problems with the

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 22 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility society in general, not just American society but around the world, is that people with disabilities just aren’t visible enough. So as a result most non- disabled folks think that the numbers are really small, we’re talking about some small numbers. They think there is maybe one guy in a wheelchair they have seen or that girl with the white cane and they probably think there are only maybe three blind people in the world.

So in fact, one of the common questions you get when you start talking about accessibility to business folks is “Well so how many people are we actually trying to do this for? Are we talking about 2000? Are we talking about 5000?” So our big challenges around the companies are to dispel some of these myths. Introduce people to some of the assisted technology we use. Introduce people to the disabled population in general and just have them realize that the numbers really aren’t as small.

And so to do this what we have done is we’ve created this place here at Yahoo called Accessibility Lab. Right now we have two of these labs. One is in Sunnyvale where our headquarters are. And the second one is Bangalore in India, because a lot of the work we do is now shipped to India as you can imagine, just like many other companies do. So

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 23 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility because of the outsourcing we realized we had to also educate folks in India about the accessibility so that when they create things for the American market or for the European market they keep in mind that accessibility is very important.

So in the Accessibility Lab what we have done, I’ll try to describe it to you in a couple of words, but basically it looks like a living room. So when you come in it has a coffee table, it has lots of books, there’s like a book library and it has a couch where people, that’s the first thing that people notice when they come in is the red couch. So we always tell them “Hey but there’s no TV, so you’ve got to listen to us and forget about TV. There’s no yogurt machine so you’ve got to bring it with you. If you want to drink coffee, bring it with you, but we’ll give you a coffee table though.”

And we do have assisted technology of course, which we have computers with screen readers, screen magnification, we have head sticks, we have onscreen keyboards and things that folks with disabilities would be using in their every day computing life. And so the reason we have all these things is first of all we wanted people to feel comfortable when they come into the lab.

The reason we chose the living room style is because we want to bring the message to people that this is really first and foremost about people and then about technology. I mean yes, we do have technology challenges, we do have technological hurdles we have to overcome. But let’s agree this is not the very first problem that non-disabled people have to deal with. First and foremost they have to realize that we’re talking about users are people and we have to make those people, we have to make websites for those people, for the users, and then we’ll talk about technology. So what we do when they come in we introduce them to like general demographics. We talk about the user, why they’re important to Yahoo. And then we have them try some of the assisted technology.

We actually simulate different tasks. We have them close their eyes and go to Yahoo and browse the webpage. We have them behave as if they’re paralyzed from the neck down and they can only use their head so they have to use something called Head Mouse that allows them to move the pointer on the screen by looking at the screen. We also have things like head sticks, I don’t know if you guys know about those, but this is basically a stick that you put on your head and then you can only type one key at a time.

The head stick is the only way you can use the keyboard because you can’t use your fingers.

We have onscreen keyboards like I mentioned…so we have people go through all these simulated tests, it makes it easier for them, or at least it opens a little, it puts a little crack in the door; so now they suddenly the world slightly differently. And these are the kinds of comments we get from people – “Oh my god I never even realized that this sort of stuff existed in the world.” “I had not realized that there are people that actually don’t use a mouse.” I had not realized that the computer can be used…”

And so we had our CEO come, also the Chief Executive Officer was in the computer lab. So she’s at least aware of the work we’re doing supportive. We had our top executives come into the room, into the Accessibility Lab both in Bangalore and in Sunnyvale. And I don’t want to over blow really the importance of this, but I can really say that I have been with Yahoo for about five years and I can definitely looking back see how much the awareness has grown.

It doesn’t mean we don’t have problems. It doesn’t mean you still don’t have to do your every day work of sort of following people and grabbing them by their

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 26 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility lapels and telling them what they need to be doing, what they shouldn’t be doing and what they’re not doing right. But the access to people is so much easier and the acceptance level is so much higher than it ever has been in my experience here.

So hopefully that just summarizes the Accessibility Labs but really the Accessibility Lab has made a huge difference in…

Caller Well I have a couple of comments. First of all, Yahoo Messenger, earlier versions were much more accessible than they are now. And secondly, and I don’t want to come off sounding I don’t know, but you have people in your labs that close their eyes and try to duplicate what happens to those of us who cannot see. I don’t like that. I think you should use actual blind people and let them put the technology and things through their paces.

Victor Tsaran Yeah. I mean this is a great point. I just wanted to say, maybe I didn’t stress it well enough that we don’t have people test, this is different. The people that I’m talking about who will come into the lab, they’re not testers. The reason why we have them simulate the experience is not to turn them into testers. This is the

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 27 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility job of the user just like you mentioned. We have users testing for us. This is the job of the developers knowing how to test and how to check that they’re doing the right things the right way.

The purpose of simulation tests is to just introduce people to the experience, okay. And there’s no other way, unfortunately – see, I have been through things where you put a blind person in front of 100 sighted people and they go on and demonstrate a screen reader to 100 people and everyone is like clapping and nodding their heads. “Yeah we got it, we got it.” Believe me they never get it until they have a chance to at least get a pinch of that experience.

So again, the point is not to turn them into advanced users or testers or developers. The point is just that we’ll give you this five or ten minutes to just get a little bit of experience of what it feels like to be blind and browse the web. I hope that clarifies things.

Also, along the lines what we do is when every week or every couple of weeks when we have new hire orientation, we introduce new employees to accessibility so it gets into their heads from Day One. And that has helped a great deal for us to just raise the awareness so that when people join here the word “accessibility” at the same time when they hear about

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 28 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility benefits and health care and whatnot, which is I think pretty rare. So it has helped us a lot too. I hope that answered your question about the simulation.

Caller Yes, good afternoon Victor. My name is Alan Dice. I use a lot of Yahoo List Groups and to be honest with you I think Yahoo Groups has probably the dominance on List Groups. I’m an owner of two list groups and we always have to deal with the captures when we’re administrating the list groups. And also there’s a support number that never seems to work, the 1-800 support number. Can you mention anything about captures and list groups that a lot of us use?

Victor Tsaran Yeah, good point. Actually before I go and talk about the Yahoo Groups I think there was one other comment that – I’m sorry I missed your name – but the person made about previous versions of Yahoo Messenger being more accessible. I’d like to hear more about this because I actually think Yahoo 11, the latest one, is probably the most accessible of all the Messengers we’ve had. The previous ones may have worked a little bit better because there were JAWS scripts for it, but I actually was one of the authors of those JAWS scripts, I just wrote them on my own time. But if you took away JAWS scripts and

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 29 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility if you wanted to use for example NVDA Open Source Screen Reader, you would not be able to use the previous versions of Yahoo Messenger.

So we are sort of doing our baby steps. I would like to get away from using any kinds of JAWS scripts and make sure that the Messenger works on any screen reader, and specifically the open source one because I think this is what people in emerging markets primarily use, the open source screen reader.

And regarding Yahoo Groups, we have introduced audio capture. I don’t know, if you don’t think it’s helpful I’d like to hear about that too. The Yahoo capture has been like the biggest obstacle for Yahoo accessibility efforts because I remember no matter what we would do people would always get back to us and say “Yeah this is all fine and what you guys are doing, but what about your capture?” And I will say that this was actually one of the biggest problems and probably one day I should write a book about all the difficulties involved in me getting the team to actually implement capture alternatives. I mean it’s almost like a soap opera. But it has been a pretty difficult ride.

But we do have right now audio capture and I was wondering if you don’t find this helpful?

Caller Well, it’s hard to understand. Most people can’t understand it. Okay? It speaks but it doesn’t speak words comprehensible.

Caller I would like to re-emphasize that again to Victor. Any time there’s a capture there needs to be an alternate phone number that that person can use to call and get that because I’ve been using it as long as it’s been out and I think I’ve found two of those that I can understand. So I cannot over emphasize the importance of that.

Victor Tsaran Got it. These are great comments. Again, I know audio captures, how difficult they can be. So I totally see your point. All I can say right now is for the number, we have worked with Customer Care because we do have complaints. I don’t know when is the last time you used the number, but it’s supposed to work and if it still doesn’t work again, I’d like to hear that because the number is there and the Customer Care should be monitoring it. In fact, we introduced TTY I think about a year ago so the deaf customers can also call in if they have problems.

So if these things don’t work we’d like to know about this, the accessibility team, because this is definitely not acceptable. Things should be working. But thanks for the audio capture comment. I guess I’ve got to go back to our capture team and keep bugging them.

Caller Yeah, it’s a great idea, it’s just most people 90% of the time are words that they cannot understand the audio.

Caller I have a different problem. I have low vision and I have my black screen with white writing. And when I’m on the internet you have all these blue things that you’re to click on to move somewhere else and they don’t show up well at all on the black background. And on a very few sites they have put in regular what the blue says and that is extremely helpful and I wonder if you could pass it on to the web designers to do that more often.

Victor Tsaran This is awesome. Actually I wonder, the blue, you mean the links right? The things that you would click on to get to other places?

Caller Yes, that’s what I’m talking about.

Victor Tsaran And so I think your concern is that sometimes there is a thing to click on but it doesn’t tell you what it is, like

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 33 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility there’s no text on the link that tells you what you’re clicking on right? Caller Well, the link itself says what it is, but it’s all in blue and it’s only when it’s in white that I can easily see it. I have to struggle to see, to read the blue, blue is not as visible.

Victor Tsaran Okay, great. You know, I think I have to follow up with you on this. This is really interesting because we’re gathering this kind of information and it would be great to…so I want to make sure that I understand the issue before I sort of bug our designers. Thanks for the comment. Billy, if there is any way for me to get in touch with some of the attendees today it would be…

Caller Yeah, I understand exactly what she’s speaking about. When I had useable sight the color blue that they use is a total non-contrast with a black background so you can’t even understand or even read what it says.

Caller This is usually set up by the web designer. I have a website and I had to pick colors and it’s very difficult

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 34 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility to pick colors, but I tried to pick ones that offset against one and other as much as possible. But if she’s using her screen reader on black there’s no way a web designer could take that all into account.

Victor Tsaran Yeah, I think these are the kinds of things we need to discuss because the challenge is again, as I mentioned before, when you design a website for millions of people there will be thousands of ways that people will say “this doesn’t look good to me” or “this looks good to me”. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. Maybe there’s a way to have flexible design or different themes where people could say “I want this color” or “I want that color.” But again, I’d like to take this further.

So are there any more questions because I’ll have to skip to the next…

Billy Brookshire Victor our time is almost gone. We’ve only got about three minutes left. And you mentioned contacting some of the folks on the call. If you wouldn’t mind giving some way that they could contact you that would be a good way to get a message to you about a particular issue that might be the easiest way to do this. I’d also like you to talk to, as kind of some

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 35 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility closure here if you would, about folks who want to make the web more accessible. What are some ways they could advocate for accessibility? What are good approaches you would suggest?

Victor Tsaran Okay, great. I guess people could just write to me at [email protected]. That’s my email address. [email protected]. When you do write I please ask you to compose your thoughts so that I don’t have to, reading mail three times and wondering what it is you’re trying to say. So maybe give us some steps to reproduce what problem you’re having, what kind of technology you use, so that the more information you give us the more effective we can be. And I’ll promise to be honest with you if this is something we can’t immediately address I’ll let you know about this. If this is something we can do something about I’ll obviously make sure you know about that too. So feel free to get in touch with me.

Regarding the closure and some addresses to help to make websites more accessible or how to advocate for accessibility – all I can say is there’s really no magic bullet. As you can imagine, accessibility is a pretty complicated field on its own. You have to figure out where you stand, what kind of tools you are using. If you are a kind of person who builds blog websites

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 36 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility or who administers a blog, I would suggest before you even invest time into creating everything on your own from scratch, look into some existing tools known as content management systems or CMS, such as Word Press, Drupal, there are a couple of others.

The reason why I’m advocating for that is because there are accessibility features built into those tools already. So there is less work for you to do as a designer. In terms of advocating for accessibility, if you want to become an advocate and an outspoken champion or someone who wants to teach others, there are lots of resources on the web.

You’re welcome to come to our blog. You’re welcome to look at what other people are doing and just get on Twitter, get on Facebook, get on Yahoo Answers, get on any kind of Yahoo Groups, get on social channels and just ask away. There are people willing to help. And yea, it may get overwhelming sometimes, but I think this is the only way to get involved into the conversation and find the advice you’re looking for. That’s probably the best advice I could give.

Billy Brookshire Good advice Victor. I appreciate it very much. We appreciate you being with us today too. Folks, I just want to remind you in some closing comments here

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 37 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility that this seminar, like all of our seminars at Hadley, is recorded and it will be archived on our website and available 24/7, 365. Victor also mentioned some resources and Victor, if you’d furnish those to me, we’ll make sure that those get on the website also as handouts attached to the past webinar, past seminar.

We’ve got some related Hadley courses folks that I want to tell you about, related to this. We just added three screen reader courses taught by Amy Salmon that are wonderful courses. We’ve also got a lot of courses you might want to take on the internet and Excel. And the upcoming webinar on March 29th at 2:00 pm is going to be on Office 2010; we’d welcome you to join in on that as well.

Finally, we’d like to thank you all for participating today. As you know, we value your feedback. So tell us what you thought about the webinar, tell us what to discuss for future topics – you can do that by sending an email to [email protected]. That’s [email protected]. Victor’s email address, I wrote it wrong the first time, the second time I got it right, I’ll repeat it for you guys. It’s vtsaran.yahoo.com

Again folks, this series is recorded, we’ve got a question here, it will be archived. You can pick it up in a couple of days. Again, come back to our website

©2011 The Hadley School for the Blind Page 38 of 41 2011-02-24-YAHOO for Web Accessibility www.hadley.edu and follow the link to past seminars and you lists of the seminars are downloaded to your method of choice. Victor, this has been wonderful. I’m going to turn the microphone back over to you for just a second. Do you have any final farewell you’d like to give the participants?

Victor Tsaran Just a quick correction, it’s actually [email protected]. You said “dot” a couple of times, but it’s “at”. I just wanted to reiterate the fact that we are looking for feedback. If you guys have problems with anything, the only way we know you have a problem is if you let us know. We try our best to do what we can, but of course we can’t catch everything. So please feel free to send an email. We have help forms, on every Yahoo page there is a “help” link. And you can contact Customer Care and they will let us know, we’re in touch with them so they would let us know if you have a problem with a particular site.

But that’s probably the only action I would like you guys to do is really be vocal, let us know what doesn’t work. Of course keeping things in a peaceful way – no stones, no rotten tomatoes or anything like that. But if you’re peaceful we’ll be peaceful too. I’m joking. Thanks everyone for joining, it’s been great.

I’m really happy. I was really happy to hear all the questions and I hope we’ll keep the dialogue going.

Billy Brookshire Sorry Donna, our time unfortunately is up. Victor, we thank you very much and if you want to stay on for a little while for Donnas, I do want to give folks the opportunity to leave if they need to. Thanks for coming. We appreciate all your comments and all your good questions. Thanks a million.

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