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See amazing new technologies that give Internet access to disabled people.

About Victor Tsaran:

Victor Tsaran is one of those people whose story makes you stop in your tracks. He grew up in a Ukrainian orphanage and is now a talented computer engineer
in the U.S. He's an accomplished musician and songwriter. And he also happens to be blind.

There are more than 50 million people in the U.S. with disabilities, including blindness, hearing-impairments, mobility difficulties and cognitive and neurological
problems knowing how disabled people use the Web is the first step to making the Web accessible.

Victor runs a special program at Yahoo! specifically developed to help people understand the various assistive technologies that are available to help those
with disabilities use the web.

(CNET ) -- Yahoo's Victor Tsaran knows how much time Web designers spend agonizing over color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he started Yahoo's accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was needed to create accessibility features.

Fortunately for Tsaran, Yahoo's accessibility manager, he's running into that problem less and less.

Web designers are starting to take accessibility as seriously as button placement or heading layout when they develop their products, improving the Web experience not only for people like Tsaran -- who lost his sight at the age of five -- but for Web users in general.

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.

There are 60 million people with disabilities in the U.S. There are more than 10 times that number around the globe. Yahoo!’s Accessibility team wants to make sure that every one of these individuals is able to use Yahoo! as their web site of choice. That will only be possible, of course, if every corner of our network is fully accessible.

A couple of days ago I have attended a presentation by Yahoo! discussing their User Interface Library, which contains a large number of widgets. This library has been very accessible over the years, but there is even more to come.