#teachinga11y

By Mike Shebanek, Senior Director of Accessibility

This week Yahoos everywhere celebrated the fifth annual Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) dedicated to raising awareness of the more than 1 billion people worldwide that have a disability. The idea is simple: get people talking, thinking and learning about what it means to enable equal access.

At Yahoo, we work every day to create online products and services that can be enjoyed by everyone, including those with disabilities. Whether a person is disabled or not, products that are conceived and designed with every individual in mind are simply better products. Great design demands nothing less.

At our headquarters in Sunnyvale,  The Yahoo Accessibility Team hosted an all-day open house in its renown Accessibility Lab, a place where Yahoos can explore common disability issues, through a variety of activities including the use of “color blind” goggles, gloves that inhibit dexterity, noise-generating (and cancelling) headphones—even simple things like using only a physical keyboard to navigate and use apps on smart phone. Then visitors learn to successfully use assistive technology like screen readers, magnifiers, high-contrast settings, speech control, closed captioning, switch controls, and alternate input devices, with our products just like our users do. These experiences enable our team to better understand and develop solutions that not only make our products more accessible, but fun, efficient, and useful for everyone.

Accessibility Team member Darren Burton teaching fellow Yahoos how to use a screen reader in the Yahoo Accessibility Lab

Yahoos who weren’t able to visit the lab were able to make GAAD meaningful by taking part in simple activities at their desk and on their mobile phones individually with their teams. Some of the activities included finding and fixing software bugs specific to accessibility while others included taking time to learning how to use a new accessibility tool like a color contrast analyzer or the new Android Accessibility Scanner.  There were even activities for non-technical Yahoos who were encouraged to take a few minutes and use their computer without a mouse or trackpad to better understand the issues facing those who are only able use a keyboard or alternate input device.

Topping the week on May 19th, Global Accessibility Awareness Day, its founders Jennison Asuncion and Joe Devon hosted a fantastic event at Mozilla in San Francisco inviting everyone in the Bay area to celebrate with great food, great company and a variety of presentations. It was my honor to be selected to kick off the celebration with a presentation on the future of digital accessibility and the important work of a great new initiative called Teach Access.org created to ensure the future of digital accessibility.

GAAD founders Jennison Asuncion and Joe Devon open the celebration

By Larry Goldberg, Director, Accessible Media

At Yahoo, we work to create products that can be enjoyed by everyone. Great design demands nothing less. Whether a person is disabled or not, products that are conceived and designed with every individual in mind are simply better products.

The reality is that most recent graduates with computer science degrees do not have experience or appreciation for the need to build for disabled individuals. We recognize that we need talented engineers with experience developing accessible products to make our products available to everyone.

To find engineers with the appropriate skill set, Yahoo, along with a number of tech industry partners, will include standard language in open job requisitions to indicate that we prefer engineering candidates with accessibility experience. This is a huge step toward ensuring that products across the industry are designed with every individual in mind. For a full list of companies committed to this initiative, check out teachingaccessibility.com.

We’ve timed this announcement that we’ll recruit accessibility-minded engineers with the 25th Anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA25), coming up this Sunday, July 26th.

While making all tech products accessible is not mandated by law, Yahoo and our peers believe that it is simply the right thing to do. We want to make sure that our users have equal access to the services we provide, whether or not they’re disabled. And, what better way to celebrate ADA25 than by recruiting engineers who have the technical chops to carry on the legacy of this important legislation!

We’re pleased that several major academic institutions have joined us in this effort - check out the full list here. These universities are considering how to prepare students of technology to build with accessibility in mind. This commitment to teaching accessibility will help ensure that future generations of engineers have the skill sets needed to qualify for positions -- such as those at Yahoo -- that state a preference for such experience.