Be honest. If you were able to picture our hundreds of millions of users, how often do you think that picture would include individuals with disabilities?

Never? Yes, that’s pretty much the average. And understandably so. Most of us, after all, have almost no direct experience with disabled others. So if we ever do think about kids or adults with disabilities, we usually think about them as being somehow “special.” As being very different from who we usually think of as Yahoo! users.

Many years ago, a friend of mine told me from his wheelchair that the toughest thing about being disabled is that “I’m never perceived as just plain ordinary. I’m either noticed too much or noticed not at all.” That’s a strange place to be, not being able to simply blend in—to be invisible—whenever you want.

Which is how the idea for Yahoo!’s Independence-2011 came about.

More than a thousand Yahoos have toured our Accessibility Labs in Sunnyvale and Bangalore and have, as a result, learned a lot about the technology of accessibility. What we haven’t been able to teach well enough, though, is the humanity of accessibility or what I think of as the ordinariness of disability. So we’re bringing that amazing ordinariness to the Yahoo! campus. We’re giving Yahoos the opportunity to better understand the disabled experience in a comfortable, engaging, and non-threatening setting.

There’ll be a lot going on during Independence-2011. A nationally known chef, for example, will be demonstrating his culinary talents. He happens to be blind. His activity is called “Cooking Without Looking.” An organization known as the AbleGamers Foundation will be showing how kids and adults with profound disabilities use various assistive technologies to enable them to play the same videogames on the same consoles as everyone else. The National Center for Accessible Media will be on hand showing a variety of technologies including one that they invented which enables people who are deaf to watch captioned versions of first-run movies while sitting right next to someone—in a mainstream movie theater—who isn’t seeing any captions at all.

Other activities and demos will be arrayed across the Yahoo! campus including what many Yahoos see as a rare opportunity to show off their basketball prowess. They’ll be playing on our courts, in wheelchairs, against a professional wheelchair basketball team from Berkeley.

Las Vegas odds have yet to be posted for the wheelchair basketball competitions, but I think it’s safe to say that the guys in the purple shirts will be humbled. And trounced.

Independence-2011 will also be exhibiting a wide variety of art created by disabled artists. And there’ll be rock music provided throughout the event by a band called No End in Sight. Led by our very own Yahoo! Superstar, Victor Tsaran, every member of the band is blind. And their music is awesome.

Rather than continue the litany of Independence-2011 activities, let me tell you instead what I hope the event will accomplish. Very simply, I hope it will help every attendee begin to understand the significance of ordinariness in the lives of individuals with disability.

That would be special.

One more thing. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention how very special Yahoo! is in the accessibility domain. Our products are really good. Our people are really better. That’s where the specialness lies.

From too many corporations I hear too many stories of frustrating resistance to accessible design or of product teams putting accessibility as the 92nd priority. Most of the objections to integrating accessibility into product design center around 2 misconceptions: 1) Accessibility will mess up the aesthetic; and 2) Accessibility will cost too much.

I don’t hear those same objections at Yahoo! I don’t hear them because Yahoo!’s Accessibility Team is ridiculously good at helping product developers understand why accessibility matters and how accessibility actually enhances any product design. I don’t hear them as well, because the people who make products at Yahoo! truly want to make those products great. Which means making them useful and usable to as many people as possible.

Our goal is to be able claim that no product ought to be called a Yahoo! product unless it is accessible. In truth, were not there yet. We’ve still got some problems to solve especially in the realm of ever-smaller mobile platforms. But at this point, with the continued support of our executive team and the innovative work of our designers, engineers, and product managers, I have no doubt that we’ll get there soon enough.

And we’ll get there incidentally, not because laws around the world require it, which they increasingly do, but because Yahoo! requires it. Because Yahoo! understands that great mainstream products are only great when they can be used by everybody.

Alan Brightman
VP, Global Accessibility Team

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series entitled, “In My Own Words,” that will give Yahoo employees the opportunity to share their own stories about Yahoo!. Feel like yodeling your own? Post your Yahoo! story on your social networks using the hashtag #myYahoostory.