By Gary Moulton, Accessibility Program Manager At Yahoo we are very proud of our iOS Weather app. For one reason, it is an Apple Design award winner. You’d have to work for the Weather Channel to know more about your weather than you can get from our app. Temperatures and forecast, sure – and for five and ten days out AND hourly and daily. But the Yahoo iOS Weather app also provides humidity, UV Index, precipitation by time of day, wind and barometric pressure. Oh, and the Moon’s curren...| 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 interfac...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 engi...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 recog...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 practi...| Yahoo Accessibility
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, whi...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 a...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 ...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 ...| Yahoo Accessibility
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...| Yahoo Accessibility
lifeatyahoo: By Lindsay Jonas, Sales Engineer YEF would like to recognize Gary Moulton, who championed a grant of $40,000 for Parents Helping Parents, an organization that seeks to provide individuals with learning disabilities the knowledge and skills necessary to advocate for themselves, navigate college systems, access assistive technology (AT) and secure services needed to enhance success. Gary expressed excitement about the grant saying, “As a former clinician, I know that parents are ...| Yahoo Accessibility
lifeatyahoo: By Andrew Schulte, Chief of Staff to the CEO, Yahoo A few weeks ago, we received nearly two dozen handwritten letters from 7th grade students at Chaboya Middle School in San Jose, all addressed to Marissa Mayer. These incredibly thoughtful and inquisitive letters penned questions about leadership, STEM, being a female CEO, the future of tech and general advice on working for a company like Yahoo. These letters touched and inspired Marissa and the team here, so what better way to...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 co...| Yahoo Accessibility
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...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 managin...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 wh...| Yahoo Accessibility
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...| Yahoo Accessibility
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 ob...| Yahoo Accessibility
By Gary Moulton, Accessibility Program Manager Last week we introduced a new Yahoo app for Android and iOS that re-imagines the Q&A experience for mobile users. Say hello to Yahoo Answers Now. Using Yahoo Answers Now with assistive technology is as simple as plugging in your bluetooth keyboard, adjusting your smartphone’s text size or turning on your built in screen reader, such as to TalkBack or VoiceOver. And, of course, “looking” for the answer to a question that will make your day. ...| Yahoo Accessibility
By Larry Goldberg, Director of Accessible Media Teach Access, the industry-academia collaboration founded by Yahoo, Facebook and two dozen other industry and higher ed organizations, has been busy. We’ve been on the road spreading the word about the need to make accessible design and development fundamental to college students in computer science, design and related fields. The mission of making technology pervasively accessible starts with making sure all college students in tech-related f...| Yahoo Accessibility
