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.

While we still have work to do toward that end, we did reach a significant milestone last month when Yahoo! India launched an Accessibility Lab in Bangalore. It is modeled after our Sunnyvale lab, which has demonstrated a variety of assistive technologies to hundreds of Yahoos since it launched in 2008.

Our Accessibility Labs are important tools for engineers who can’t imagine life with a disability. The reality is that not everyone can use a mouse, type on a keyboard, or see the computer screen. We simulate that experience so our developers can learn how to think about users with disabilities during their product development process. We have screen readers to help them understand the experience of a blind user, single switches and onscreen keyboards for physically disabled users, communication devices for kids with speech impairments, etc. More and more Yahoo! products are being designed and developed in our Bangalore office, so it became clear that we needed to enhance our ability to train engineers and designers there.

Here’s a slideshow of photos from our grand opening event in India:

Also, a a global company, we are keenly aware that commercial screen readers are generally out of reach for most blind people living in developing countries. So we’ve sponsored the non-profit NV Access Foundation, which is working on a free, open-source screen reader. Our support will help them improve web features for NVDA for Windows, making it easier for visually-impaired users around the world to browse the Web – especially when they encounter Web 2.0 technologies. And by making NVDA’s screen reader a better product, we’re also helping all the web developers who use it as their testing tool.

Everybody wins.

Victor Tsaran
Sr. Accessibility Program Manager

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Do the phrases above mean anything to you? If they do, then you are genius! If they don’t, then, don’t worry. You are not alone!

This is what I, as a screen reader user, hear when I come across an image on the web that does not have “ALT attribute” or, speaking in simpler terms, is not labeled with alternative text. Put several of such images together or sprinkle tens of them throughout a web page, and you’ve got an unpleasant browsing experience and a very unhappy user.

The Yahoo! Accessibility Stakeholders Group decided to do something this week to help reduce the number of unlabeled images on Yahoo! web sites as well as to encourage Yahoo! developers and designers to pay attention to things that are not readily visible on the screen. In other words, you do not always get what you see!

ALT attribute, as it’s known in the developer’s world, is a feature of HTML language to provide alternative text for any image on the screen. Alternative text is invisible to the user, but is used by screen readers to describe the image to a blind user or by the browser to display something inside the image placeholder while the image itself is loading (this normally happens on a slow connection). Thus, our internal ALT= campaign came into existence!

Listen to the screen reader sound sample of images with and without ALT attribute. Can you guess which is which?

The ALT= campaign is just one of the many programs my team has created to help Yahoos keep universal accessibility in mind as they design and build our products. We hope it’ll improve your experience across our network. And if you have a web site, please mind your ALTs.

For an introduction to how a screen reader works, check out this video (courtesy of the Yahoo! User Interface Theater).

Victor Tsaran
Yahoo! Accessibility Program Manager