Accessible Experts: Victor Tsaran The Yahoo! Accessibility Manager

I recently spoke with Victor Tsaran, who works as the accessibility manager at Yahoo!. I asked him about how he started to work with the company, what accessibility means to him personally and what Yahoo! does to ensure the accessibility of their products. Below, you can read what Victor says about the current Yahoo! accessibility work, and his testimony on how accessibility makes a difference in his own life.

How it all began

I joined Yahoo! in June 2005. At that time there was no formal accessibility team. The company did have an accessibility consultant working out of the UK who was helping them to maintain their partnership commitments and comply with more stringent accessibility laws in European countries. Additionally, since Yahoo! has always been known for its pretty strong front-end web development discipline, particularly in the UK, there already were a lot of engineers inside the company who evangelized web accessibility as part of front-end best practices. Thanks to one of the executive champions a position for an accessibility lead was created and this is when I joined.

When I came onboard, I was the first person in the Sunnyvale office who used a screen reading software for his daily tasks. This fact alone created a lot of excitement among developers. Up until then, they were trying to follow best practices as best as possible, but there wasn't any assistive technology users immediately available to them who could answer accessibility-related questions, specifically in the area of user experience. Hence, the first year or so I spent doing a lot of the grass-root level work e.g. organizing screen reader demonstrations and workshops. It is through various internal workshops and informal training sessions that I became friends with a lot of developers, many of whom still work at the company. Some friendships went beyond accessibility. In some way, people started caring about accessibility because they actually knew someone who benefited from the work that they were doing.

The culture of accessibility at Yahoo!

A couple of years ago several web developers from the Yahoo! UK office established an informal group, called EU Accessibility Task Force, whose charter was to help other teams with code reviews, train employees on web accessibility and disability issues, and promote accessibility outside the company. Following their example we now have similar groups in almost every major Yahoo! office (Sunnyvale, Bangalore, London). Most recently, these groups have been united into one Global Accessibility Task Force.

The benefit of having local task force groups is that employees in those offices are provided with an opportunity of reaching out to accessibility experts and getting advice whenever they need it as well as receiving necessary training in accessibility on the local level. Being represented in those major offices enabled us to reach out to various product teams, regardless of whether they are located in Europe, India or the USA.

Accessibility labs

A big boost to accessibility inside the company as a corporate initiative came when we established the accessibility lab in Sunnyvale in 2008. There have been some articles written about our accessibility lab already, but in essence, it’s the place where we educate various Yahoo! teams and executives about accessibility, people with disabilities and the assistive technology they use on an every day basis, e.g. voice recognition software, screen readers, onscreen keyboards, single switches etc. During the introductory tour that the teams go through, we also ask them to simulate various user experiences by trying out some of the assistive technology with their favorite Yahoo! web site. Once we’ve guided teams through a generic tour of the Accessibility Lab, we invite them for follow-up sessions where we sit down with developers and key decision-makers to work on problems specific to their products. These discussions can range from bug prioritization and testing procedures to implementing new ideas within those products.

One example that immediately comes to mind is the new Yahoo! Search which incorporates an interactive way of moving between the search field, search suggestions, related concepts and search results. The user can navigate between these panels using the keyboard or a mouse. Screen reader users, however, get additional navigation instructions to help them understand the interface. In order to provide these helpful instructions we utilize ARIA technology to speak that information to the user.

This solution took several iterations to come up with. First engineers needed to figure out which screen readers would be able to support this interaction, and which ones would not. Second, if a particular screen reader didn’t work with this solution, we had to decide what fallback to offer to the user. Finally, we had to run several prototypes through testing, implementation and integration into the production Yahoo! Search site.

After the success with the Accessibility Lab in Sunnyvale, we thought it would be great to extend it to Yahoo! India. About four months ago, we’ve opened a similar Accessibility Lab in Bangalore, which is basically designed to do the same kind of activities that we have in Sunnyvale. We are also looking into expanding our lab to other local Yahoo! Offices.

Accessible products

While it is true that a lot of our efforts go into making sure that Yahoo!'s most visible products, such as Home page, Search, Buzz, News, Finance etc, are accessible, we equally spend a great deal of time on various internal processes to ensure that accessibility features are present in every Yahoo! Site. We also promote accessibility within our open source initiatives such as the Yahoo! User Interface Library, the Astra Flash Library etc, so that developers from outside Yahoo! can also benefit from our knowledge and experience in this area while using our tools.

One of the most recent products from Yahoo! is the new yahoo.com home page. It is a fairly new interaction model for a lot of our long-time users, both from the interface as well as conceptual prospective. While the web page itself is recognizable to a certain point, i.e. it features some familiar sections such as News, Featured Stories etc, it introduces a new section called “My Favorites”. The "My Favorites" section allows the user to choose modules or apps that feature the content they mostly care about and preview them right from the Yahoo! home page. Some of the modules are , for example, "BBC News", "Discovery Channel", “How Stuff Works”, "FaceBook", "Gmail", "Weather" etc. After adding any of the modules from the gallery the user simply hovers over them with a mouse and is able to quickly preview their content without having to leave their Yahoo! home page.

I am proud to say that the Home Page team considers accessibility as one of the important features of their product and, as a result, gives a lot of attention to ensuring an enjoyable and customizable experience for all visitors of the yahoo.com site. The developers worked hard to make this interaction accessible to screen reader users in particular because screen reader tends to be the most demanding of the assistive technologies. Both keyboard and screen reader users can perform all of the same tasks that their mouse counterparts can, e.g. load and close modules, add, edit and even rearrange their favorites. Additionally, the user can further customize the behavior of their Yahoo! home page through the "page options" link, e.g. choose another color theme or switch to "compact view" which will disable all hover interaction altogether.

Let me also say a couple of words about the Yahoo! Classic Mail. Over the years this product has acquired a lot of the features that were not present in the original version, such as "Chat and Text Message" module, "News" and "Weather" modules, "Your Connections" module etc. The rationale for these enhancements is pretty obvious. Since we have a lot of dedicated users who are accustomed to the "classic" interface, they may not want to switch to a more interactive version of Mail for various reasons but would still like to take advantage of some of the social networking features that Yahoo! offers. Yahoo! Classic Mail is known for its accessible interface, however, we are always on a look-out, particularly with regards to new features such as the "Chat and Text Message" module. The "Chat" module allows you to chat with your friends who are logged into their E-mail. When they are logged in, their names will show up at the top of the window. You can just click on their name and chat with them while reading your e-mail.

To make this feature accessible for screen reader users we utilized ARIA technology. When you chat with other people, the screen reader will announce what they wrote, and when you write back to them, you will hear what you wrote. You can have several chats open at the same time and switch between those windows via keyboard.

Accessibility on the personal level

Technology plays an important role in my personal life. I am very much affected by it in everything I do, from shopping online and reading books to recording my own music on the computer. The first time I started using a computer was in 1994 at the Overbrook School for the Blind in Philadelphia. Attending an International Program at this school was a life-changing experience for me. I had not used a computer keyboard before, and it was the first time I had a chance to interact with a computer. I quickly realized that through computers I could do so many more things than ever before. An example would be an ability to read my course work at the university, for which in my pre-computer days, I would have to rely on my sighted friends' help.

I remember when I went back to Ukraine after attending the Program in Philadelphia, and talking to my friends, everybody was telling me that “Wow you’re spending so much time with a computer.” It seems you are on the computer all the time.” What I used to tell them is that a computer for me is not just a tool to write a Word document or check e-mail, it’s way more, because through a computer, you can do so many things that sighted people, for example, take for granted - even something as simple as reading a book. For me personally, I guess I can’t stress enough how much technology means to me. In fact, if someone took all my gadgets from me right now, I would probably feel lost, not that I would be incapable of moving around or doing things, but it would definitely make my everyday life more complicated and less effective.

My attitude towards technology directly affects how I treat my work at Yahoo!. I strongly believe that the more users get online, particularly users with disabilities, the more chance they have to change or improve their lives. To me, getting online means much more than just checking e-mail or subscribing to various newsgroups. Through the Web, people with disabilities have a range of opportunities, from starting their own online business to social interactions such as finding people with similar interests, finding someone to talk to, discovering friends or, to be more precise, doing what everyone else is doing.