Yahoo Accessibility

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.

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.

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

HC Lai, User Experience Researcher,  Rushani Wirasinghe, User Experience Researcher

Digital advertising is the financial backbone of the Internet industry, enabling many companies to monetize the traffic to their digital products and provide customers with free access to this incredible content. At Yahoo, our user experience (UX) researchers not only work closely with the teams designing consumer products, but also with those managing our advertising platforms. We have identified best practices for conducting effective user research in the context of advertising products, because it’s important to recognize the unique nature of the participants.

Yahoo Gemini Advertiser Council

The B2B UX research team has shifted from one-time interactions to longer term relationships with users of advertising and publishing tools, and actively works to build these relationships. Partnering with the product marketing team, the B2B UX research team developed the Yahoo Gemini Advertiser Council, which engages Yahoo Gemini advertisers annually with the goal of enabling users to be part of the product development process. Yahoo Gemini customers participate in diverse activities such as research studies throughout a product lifecycle, quarterly communications, and biannual in-person meetings with our product team. These activities not only positively impact advertisers’ perception of Yahoo Gemini, but they facilitate deep collaboration between our users, product team, and sales team. Based on direct feedback, Yahoo Gemini Advertiser Council members feel more confident that Yahoo can meet their advertising needs.

Flurry’s Corporate Sponsorship  

Another example of a user panel is Flurry’s corporate sponsorship of Hacker Dojo [1]. Hacker Dojo is a community of app developers and startups located in Silicon Valley. We originally reached out to Hacker Dojo to conduct a one-time usability study on their premises. When we learned that we could expand the relationship from a one-time engagement to a longer-term relationship in the form of a corporate sponsorship, we did not hesitate. The sponsorship has provided Flurry with a user panel that they use to collect user feedback with minimal effort. It has also been a good opportunity to promote Flurry within the local community.

Building a user panel not only helps minimize the lead time to recruit third party users but it also allows researchers to follow a community of users and observe how their usage of a product evolves over time.

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.

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.

Frank Bentley / Sr. Principal Researcher

The Yahoo UX Research and Accessibility (UXRA) team is heading to the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (otherwise known as CHI 2017) in Denver!  

This year we have a series of great talks from our researchers and interns about the research we have conducted across consumer and advertising products. If you’ll be at CHI, you can find the room numbers for talks listed below.  We’re also hiring, so stop by our booth at the breaks. If you can’t make it to Denver, links to download our papers are available below.

CHI is an example of how research in industry builds off of the best academic research available and contributes back to the research community with our own findings and systems that we create. Each of our papers below cites dozens of studies from other corporate labs or universities, and we hope contributes to future scholarship in these venues.  We are an applied research group, and the findings from this research have a direct impact on our products and research culture within the company, as well as helps to put our users first in creating new product experiences at Yahoo for our billion+ users.

“If a person is emailing you, it just doesn't make sense”: Exploring Changing Consumer Behaviors in Email

Monday, 11:30 - 12:50 Room 203

Authors: 

Frank R Bentley, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Nediyana Daskalova, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Nazanin Andalibi, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Comparing the Reliability of Amazon Mechanical Turk and Survey Monkey to Traditional Market Research Surveys

Wednesday, 16:30 - 17:50 Room 302

Authors:

Frank R Bentley, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Nediyana Daskalova, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Brooke White, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Applied Research for Advertising Products: Tactics for Effective Research

Thursday, 11:30 - 12:50 Room 302

Authors:

Hsiao Chun Lai, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Rushani Wirasinghe, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

It's All About Coupons: Exploring Coupon Use Behaviors in Email

Thursday, 11:30 - 12:50 Room 302

Authors:

Nediyana Daskalova, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Frank R Bentley, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Nazanin Andalibi, Yahoo, Sunnyvale, United States

Talks by Other Yahoo Employees

Increasing Activity in Enterprise Online Communities Using Content Recommendation

Tuesday, 11:30 - 12:50 Room 110/112

Authors: 

Ido Guy, Yahoo Research, Haifa, Israel

Inbal Ronen, IBM Research, Haifa, Israel

Elad Kravi, Technion, Haifa, Israel

Maya Barnea, IBM Research, Haifa, Israel

Multimodal Classification of Moderated Online Pro-Eating Disorder Content

Tuesday, 16:30 - 17:50 Room 110/112

Authors:

Stevie Chancellor, School of Interactive Computing Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States

Yannis Kalantidis, Yahoo! Inc, San Francisco, United States

Jessica Annette Pater, School of Interactive Computing Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, United States

Munmun De Choudhury, School of Interactive Computing Georgia Tech, Atlanta, United States

David A. Shamma, Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Chair, Session: 360 Video

Wednesday, 14:30 - 15:50 Room 205

By Mike Shebanek, Senior Director, Accessibility

Yahoo’s Accessibility Lab is well known for creating hands-on interactions for software developers to experience how people with disabilities successfully use technology—when it’s well designed of course!  One of the experiences makes use of goggles with filtered lenses that simulate different types of vision loss, such as glaucoma and cataracts. Unfortunately, the lab is limited in the number of goggles we have available, and visitors to the lab can’t take the goggles home with them or back to their offices to experience vision loss in their own environments or to share this alternate reality with their colleagues. Thanks to Theia Immersive in the UK, that is about to change.

Theia has just introduced a new technology called Eyeware which is designed to enable architects, environmental engineers and space planners to explore how their designs and spaces might limit or enable people with disabilities. But by putting Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality to work, Eyeware can also create a real-time, immersive simulation that opens the door to simulating the many different and unique experiences of how people with low vision, color blindness and a variety of other eye conditions, see and navigate the world around them.

Using Virtual Reality, Theia Immersive can model a real environment, indoors or out and can simulate what it would be like to navigate with vision loss, or limited mobility. But even more impressively, they can make adjustments to the virtual environment in real time, to better understand how changes in lighting, signage, the use of color, and many other elements impact a user’s experience in that space. The system uses OmniDeck technology that drives the VR experience and enables a person to really (physically) walk through the virtual world, hear positional audio, and interact with their virtual environment. All of this can be captured, analyzed, and shared, also in real time, to an audience via TV monitors and computer screens.

The company has also created a personal, mobile version of their technology—Eyeware for iOS and Eyeware for Android. This version uses Augmented Reality - the app runs on  your phone when mounted in the Google Cardboard viewer (about $10). Theia Immersive offers their own Cardboard viewer that has a cutout to uncover your phone’s built-in rear camera (you can cut a hole in your own Cardboard viewer to achieve the same purpose). You can choose various visual effects  to simulate different types of vision loss. As you look through the Cardboard googles, you’re seeing the real world around you, but through the eyes of someone that has vision loss.

Video of the Augmented Reality Eyeware app using a Cardboard Viewer

We are very excited about this new technology and its far-reaching potential and are working with Theia to bring Eyeware into the Yahoo Accessibility Lab. We think it can have a profound impact on our visitors and will be encouraging our product teams to “see it for themselves” and consider how they can better design their products to provide access to people with vision loss and other disabilities.

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.”

By Darren Burton, Yahoo Accessibility Specialist

The men's college basketball tournament, aka The Big Dance, is a truly massive event across America. 68 of the top colleges in the nation take part, and offices and sports bars everywhere are abuzz with excitement over their brackets.  I’ve been filling out mine since I was a college student back in the 1980’s, and that didn’t stop after I lost my sight in the 1990’s. I always played, but it just wasn’t the same when a friend or colleague filled out the brackets for me. It was kind of like someone was looking over my shoulder, and it affected how I made my picks.

All that changes today.  I'm excited to announce that for the first time, you can use your favorite screen reader to complete your bracket using Yahoo Fantasy Sports Tourney Pick'em on your iOS device.  Why such a big deal?  Because now you’ll be able to join the millions of other college basketball fans on Yahoo Sports. Even if you have a disability like I do, you can independently join or create your own group, make your picks and track your progress against your friends through the entire championship tournament.

It all starts on Sunday when the brackets go live. Choose a winner for each of the games in every round and then root for your teams as you track your predictions throughout the six rounds of the tournament. For the iOS app, we’ve implemented Apple’s “magic-tap,” a single two-finger double-tap gesture  that let’s you quickly find and follow your favorite team from round to round. So, if you like Kansas to win it all, you just find Kansas in the first round, do the magic-tap, and you are immediately taken to the Kansas game in the second round without any additional taps or swipes. Magic-tap again, and you are on the Kansas game in the third round. It’s a super easy way to follow your favorite team.

Check out Tourney Pick’em on Yahoo Fantasy Sports or download the latest version of the Yahoo Fantasy app on your iOS device.  The Brackets are revealed at 5:30 pm EDT Sunday March 12, and you’ll have until tipoff of the first game on Thursday to join a group and make your picks.  

Frank Bentley, Senior Principal User Researcher

At Yahoo we move quickly.  Our product teams are often shipping new features every week or two and designers are constantly exploring new solutions. While User Research methods have traditionally been fairly slow to execute, especially in the academic traditions of anthropology and human-computer interaction, we have a need to move more quickly and fit our work into the weekly sprints of our product teams.

For Yahoo Mail, we tried an experiment last year where we conducted weekly user research every Friday.  This gave teams Monday through Thursday to work on their new designs and implementations and Friday for us to conduct research and for them to observe and plan for their next week from our research labs. Concepts could be tested in a design state iteratively from week to week, and then tested again in a working build in a subsequent week once it was implemented.  This allows us to rapidly test new designs, iterate each Friday until we get something that both provides value and is usable by our participants, and test final implementations once they are ready.  We augment this with larger scale surveys and field studies as necessary for bigger features and strategic directions.

Along with testing prototypes, these sessions also include in-depth interviews on particular topics of interest, including walkthroughs of current behavior and understanding of recent experiences.  These questions help us to understand particular domains over several weeks and dozens of participants and help to set strategy when combined with other qualitative data from surveys and usage logs.

These weekly studies have transformed the design and product process to truly be user focused.  We test a wide variety of concepts and implementations each week.  Product Managers and Designers don’t have to worry about setting up a special study for their topic, getting users recruited, and waiting several weeks for studies to be executed.  They can rely on having spots in the weekly study for last-minute additions of new prototypes or qualitatively testing topics that have appeared in logs or online user feedback.

HC Lai, User Experience Researcher

As a UX researcher working on advertising products, a decent portion of my day is spent observing how advertisers use advertising solutions. During various studies I have conducted, it came to my attention that their frustration often rooted in time and efforts required to complete a task. Additionally, we heard search advertisers’ needs in achieving even better results with their search campaigns on Yahoo Gemini while spending less time and effort managing multiple platforms. We came to realize that “time is money” to our advertisers.

By Danielle Lottridge, User Experience Researcher

Usability testing is a method for evaluating the ease-of-use of a product or feature by testing with with people, or “users” of a system. The goal of usability testing is to observe behavior during task flows, observe whether and how users complete flows, and note any conceptual misunderstandings that occur. Participants' reactions are important for other methods such as surveys and concept testing however in usability testing we care whether participants can get the task done. Usability testing provides direct feedback by observing how real people use a product. Usability testing tends to be structured as a one-on-one task-based interview where a facilitator prompts a participant to complete a series of tasks; for example, for an ecommerce website, we might test the usability of adding an item to the shopping cart and completing the checkout process.

One-on-one testing takes time and a facilitator. What if, to save time and money, we tried to have users report usability problems – would they be able to do it? Of course it depends! Participants who frequently participate in usability testing for services such as usertesting.com have a disproportinate amount of experience completing tasks and articulating any hiccups that they encounter along the way. They are more likely to be able to describe their mental model of what they expected and how what they encountered was different than what they expected. However, these participants have so much experience with different systems and design patterns that they may no longer be representative of the general population, but instead representative of the extremely tech savvy, or of amateur UX evaluators. Armed with this experience, these types of participants may encounter a different set of usability problems compared to the general population.

Figure 1. Sketch of Elements of a Mental Model

Image Credit https://openclipart.org/detail/187444/andrew-loomis-drawing-the-head-and-hands-potrace-43

Those with less awareness of their mental model and less experience articulating it won’t be able to report usability problems. A case in point: in a recent quantitative diary study with a few hundred participants in a gen pop sample, a market researcher measured agreement with the statement “This app is easy to use.”  Perhaps unsurprisingly, most participants reported the app was extremely easy to use! Behavioral data showed that participants were not able to complete basic tasks. Also, dozens spontaneously asked for instructions for the app. The behavioral data and requests for instructions directly contradict the self-report data. Why is this? Participants may’ve genuinely experienced the app as easy to use and didn’t realize that they weren’t able to complete basic tasks. Based on literature that says that Western people feel competent and don’t realize it when they aren’t [1], participants may feel confident in their abilities and thus don’t entertain the possibility that they weren’t able to figure out an interface. The bottom line is that self-reported usability data are easy and cheap to measure but most likely misleading. As we say in our group, bad data is worse than no data. Observing the behavior of representative participants is a gold standard in usability testing and should remain so.

By Frank Bentley, Senior Principal User Researcher

Often a design or product team will have a question in the course of their work where an immediate answer is needed in order to proceed. Perhaps they want to know if it's worth it to support a feature given people's current behaviors. Or perhaps they want to test some different icons for intelligibility. Ideally, they'd have answers in a few hours so that they could continue their work. Larger product teams might have multiple questions like this per week in the course of their work.

However traditional User Research activities take time. In-person studies have to be planned, participants need to be recruited and data needs to be analyzed. This can typically take a week or more. Large market research studies often take even longer and are very expensive. But product teams in agile environments need to work faster than these traditional methods can support.  

Over the past two years, we've developed a process for quickly designing, running and analyzing mid-scale surveys to support design and product questions within hours or a day at most. Frequently we can have a question one afternoon, run the survey that evening and have data by the morning of what a representative sample of Americans do. We can run dozens of these surveys every month to understand which use cases to support, where current frustrations lie and the intelligibility of designs. The key is to have a few focused questions and to deploy the survey using a large online survey platform (e.g. Survey Monkey or Amazon's MTurk) to a broad audience. These are not marketing-style attitudinal questions, but questions on actual behaviors that people engage in as a part of their everyday life, so that we can quickly quantify whether a use case is worth supporting. This method has helped us to learn that over 90% of Americans receive coupons and deals in their email and that 64% had used one in the past two weeks. We've also learned about the percentage of email users who turn off their notifications by platform and have tested a variety of icons for the Stationary feature of Yahoo Mail, finding one with 7x the recognition rate of the current design within hours of receiving the files from a designer.

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.