#user first

Alt Text: Yahoo Mail

By Mike Shebanek, Yahoo Senior Director of Accessibility

You may have heard that we just launched our new Yahoo Mail desktop experience that makes it even easier to access and organize all of the important information in your Inbox. The new version of desktop Mail has been completely redesigned from the ground up, sits on our latest tech stack, and is fast, reliable, and intuitive to use. It however also takes a huge leap forward for accessibility, with many user interface and assistive technology compatibility improvements.

Yahoo’s Accessibility team and the Yahoo Mail team have been closely working together from the beginning of this project to identify and address previous barriers to accessibility and efficiency, and the teams have poured themselves into this new release.

With the new Yahoo Mail experience, NVDA and VoiceOver screen reader users have access to the full desktop Yahoo Mail experience including threaded message viewing, stationery, animated gifs, emoji, and more. The Inbox is also now presented as a table which makes it faster and easier to use and allows you to control what information you hear about each message. For example, screen reader users can find or mark messages as read or unread, delete or star them, and know how many messages are in a thread all from the Inbox without first having to open the message.

In addition to a new beautiful design that reduces visual clutter and improves responsiveness, we’ve also updated the set of visual themes including a new “dark” theme that provides high contrast using a dark background with bright text. This is helpful for light-sensitive and low-vision users. There’s also a new Inbox spacing option that reduces the need to pan around the screen when using high magnification. Of course, Yahoo Mail is also fully navigable using a keyboard alone (i.e. “tab key navigation”).

The images below show the default (black on white) Yahoo Mail theme and the new dark high-contrast theme.

Mike Shebanek, Yahoo Senior Director of Accessibility

I’m very pleased to share that last night, Teach Access, an initiative to include accessibility and universal design principles in the curricula of computer scientists, designers and researchers in undergraduate, graduate and continuing education, was awarded an Honorable Mention Chairman's Award for Advancement in Accessibility (Chairman's AAA) by the Federal Communications Commission.  

The Chairman's AAA is an FCC program recognizing products, services, standards and other innovative developments that improve the experience of people with disabilities in telecommunications and technology. Yahoo is a founding partner of Teach Access, which was awarded this honor for its ambitious mission of incorporating fundamental concepts about accessible design and development across undergraduate design, computer science, UX and related curricula.  

Image: Teach Access logo

Teach Access was created by a coalition of tech companies, universities and advocates for people with disabilities. Its mission is to expand awareness and knowledge of accessible technology development in higher education through approaches such as faculty bootcamps, guest lectures, internships, challenge grants for research and curriculum development and industry partnerships. Teach Access also builds open source online learning tools that reflect and teach accessibility best practices.

Image: Chairman’s award for advancement in accessibility certificate

Image: Teach Access logo

Mike Shebanek, Yahoo Senior Director of Accessibility

I’m very excited to share that Teach Access, an initiative to include accessibility and universal design principles in the curricula of computer scientists, designers and researchers in undergraduate, graduate and continuing education, has won the Knowbility, Inc. award for Educational Achievement! Yahoo is a founding member of the project.

Teach Access was created by a coalition of tech companies, universities and advocates for people with disabilities. Its mission is to expand awareness and knowledge of accessible technology development in higher education through approaches such as faculty bootcamps, guest lectures, internships, challenge grants for research and curriculum development and industry partnerships. Teach Access also builds open source online learning tools that reflect and teach accessibility best practices. The tools are widely available to individuals, companies and organizations. In addition, Teach Access has developed job descriptions that include preference for accessibility knowledge to support recruitment activities and to extend the post-secondary foundation through “on the job training” in product and service development.

Image: Knowbility Award.  Inscription reads Knowbility is pleased to recognize Teach Access for Educational Achievement for creating and promoting an initiative to include accessibility and universal design principles in college and university curricula. 2017 Community Heroes of Accessibility Awards.

By Mike Shebanek, Senior Director of Accessibility

Starting today, you’ll notice some significant changes to our blog, both in design and in content, that better reflect who we are and what we do. I’d like to to tell you why we’re making these changes and what you can look forward to as you follow our blog.

One of the things that makes Yahoo’s approach to accessibility unique is that its Accessibility Team and its User Experience Research Team are integrated. That may sound like an obvious approach, but it hasn’t always been this way at Yahoo and we’ve come to find out it’s pretty unusual in the tech industry. In the all-too-rare organizations that actually have a dedicated Accessibility Team, they often report to the chief legal counsel, or are part of an administrative or compliance group. Other times they’re siloed in one division, which prevents them from being able to impact product development or customer support in another. Having a dedicated Accessibility Team and where that team is placed in an organization says a lot about a company’s values, and this is especially true of Yahoo.

In our case, we’re part of a team called User Research and Accessibility or UXRA for short. Our team supports the entire company – every division, every VP, every employee – and it is tasked with representing our users’ unique needs, requirements and points of view in every activity we undertake. We are not just “closely aligned” with our user research team – we are the same team! We share user study labs, training, techniques, findings and the same mission: to accurately represent all users. We work to ensure that users come first in whatever we do, and that this includes people with disabilities, of all ages, of all genders and of all abilities. So, whenever we perform a user study, take a survey, gather product feedback or identify requirements, people with disabilities are included along with everyone else. We can’t imagine any other way.

Google AdSenseのUser First プログラムが登場（ベータ版）

By Mike Shebanek, Senior Director, Accessibility

Engaging users, actively observing, and then incorporating feedback into product design is central to Yahoo’s product development work. In addition to routinely performing small group or one-on-one user research that includes people with disabilities, a method of engaging users and gathering feedback unique to the Yahoo User Experience Research and Accessibility (UXRA) team is something we call User Nights.

Image caption: Dozens of Yahoo engineers wearing themed T-shirts sitting side by side with volunteers, observing them using Yahoo mobile apps on their smartphones

User Nights pair a user-volunteer one-on-one with a Yahoo engineer who observes how they complete a set of familiar tasks. It’s unusual for companies to have user researchers at all (it’s a function that’s often outsourced to consultants) but for those that do, it’s not so unusual to conduct observational research and report findings to a product team. Yahoo does this routinely. But our User Nights are unique in that we also arrange for the engineers who are actively engaged in building a product to sit side-by-side for over an hour observing how people are using it—with no coaching. They’re able to experience first-hand what’s working, what’s not, and the creative and unexpected ways people are using their products. Feedback and lessons learned from these experiences find their way directly back into the next release.

As Yogi Berra once said, “You can observe a lot just by watching.”

Image caption: The cover of the new 2nd edition of the textbook, “Research Methods in Human-Computer Interaction.” It features a hand-drawn group of users sitting behind a computer including a user who is blind holding a cane.

By Darren Burton, Yahoo Accessibility Specialist

Tumblr just launched the Android version of Cabana, Tumblr’s cool new video sharing app, and it is just as fun and addicting as the iOS version we launched last month. As Yahoo’s Senior Director of Accessibility Mike Shebanek mentioned in his blog about the iOS version, the concept of Cabana is simple but really powerful. You find a funny or interesting video, you invite your friends, and you all watch the video together on your phones, while you watch each other at the same time. I’ve had a blast using Cabana, and I love getting my brother to watch videos with me while I mock his naïve political biases ;-)

Image: Cabana by Tumblr logo

Pausing to reflect on my poor choice for the setting of my testing, I realized that as a blind guy, Cabana could be a virtual assistance tool, connecting me to friends or family in case I need to “borrow eyes” to find or identify something. I’ve been thinking of many ways this could be useful in my daily life. It is not what we designed the app to do; it is just another reason to love Cabana. And by the way, although she initially expressed her annoyance at the interruption, my wife was still watching videos and chatting with me nearly an hour later!

Even if  you or a friend have a disability, we want you to enjoy Cabana and invite your friends to watch videos together too. As with the iOS version, the Android version of Cabana has also been optimized in several ways to make it accessible:

Cabana incorporates live video conferencing so you can use sign language

The color scheme has been tweaked to make it higher contrast for improved readability

You can control Cabana using a physical keyboard or alternate input device in addition to gestures

The app has been optimized for TalkBack users so if you’re a screen reader user, you can invite your friends, answer an invitation, and choose and control the video. Even the welcome and setup screens, including the camera feature used to capture your avatar photo, have been optimized.

Virtual Assistant

I discovered another powerful way to use Cabana. While my wife Paula was reading a book in bed, I set up my iPhone on her nightstand with Cabana showing a Saturday Night Live video clip. My Android phone was connected to the same video, and I took it into my kitchen and began chatting with Paula. After grumbling her annoyance at the interruption, she graciously informed me that she could see a nice pile of dishes that could use my attention.

Image: Cabana Image.  Text reads Watch Videos Together

Image: Cabana image.  Text reads Hang out, watch stuff.

By Mike Shebanek

Senior Director of Accessibility

This week, Tumblr released a cool new iOS app called Cabana. The idea behind it is simple but really powerful. When you find a funny or interesting video you can’t wait to share with your friends, fire up Cabana, tap their names and invite them to join you. You’ll all see each other, and the video, together live. Share a good cry, make jokes, shout at the video, or just make crazy faces. It’s up to you what you say or do. The only caveat is to be careful—it’s totally addicting!

If you or a friend have a disability, you might be wondering if Cabana is something you can do too. Of course!  We want everyone to be part of this new experience and invite their friends so we’ve optimized Cabana in a bunch of ways to make it accessible:

Cabana incorporates live video conferencing so you can use sign language

The color scheme has been tweaked to make it higher contrast for improved readability

You can drive Cabana using a physical keyboard or alternate input device

The app has been optimized for VoiceOver users (iOS) so if you’re a screen reader user, you can invite your friends, answer an invitation, and choose and control the video. Even the welcome and setup screens, including the camera feature used to capture your avatar photo, have been optimized.

Image: The Cabana app running on an iPhone showing six friends watching a video. The caption next to the phone reads “Watch videos together.”

Image: The Cabana app running on an iPhone showing the Friends list. The heading on the Cabana app reads “Hang Out, watch stuff.”