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 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 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 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 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 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 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.