Victor Tsaran is one of those people who just impresses the hell out of you. 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.

Victor runs Yahoo!’s accessibility program. He helps make it easy for people with all kinds of disabilities to use our sites. When I first met Victor, I had the same naïve reaction most people have – dumbfounded by how he could crank open his laptop and be fully self-sufficient reading email and surfing the web. That’s because I was clueless about all the remarkable ways that people with disabilities use technology.

Victor’s made it his mission to educate our designers and engineers, helping change their assumptions that accessibility somehow requires sacrifice or compromise. On the contrary, Victor argues that accessible design is better for everyone. Just as curb-cuts were designed for wheelchairs, they’re also a great convenience for strollers, luggage and shopping carts, right?

But driving the point home sometimes means making someone walk a mile in his moccasins. Enter the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, which has been toured by more than 75 product teams to date. It’s filled with a wide array of assistive technologies – screen readers, onscreen keyboards, interactive Braille displays, etc. When Yahoos arrive, they’re told they’ve just had a stroke and can’t type with their fingers. They’re given a rubber ball and asked to type their name. Um… Next, they’re fully paralyzed. “OK, try to send an email.” Uh… After they’re introduced to the technology solutions, they watch videos of disabled people in action.

All this leaves developers making accessibility a goal before they write their first line of code. It’s why anybody can access rich features and tools on products like Yahoo! Sports, My Yahoo!, Yahoo! Finance, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Search, Yahoo! Messenger for the iPhone. It’s why third-party websites that are inaccessible in their own right are now entirely accessible via the new “favorites” area on the Yahoo! Homepage. Victor has helped Yahoo! make enormous strides since joining us four years ago, but there’s still more to come.

We spent some time following Victor with a video camera to not only understand his work, but to appreciate his daily experience. Commuting by train. Playing guitar. Making lunch with his wife Karo Caran, a fellow student from the Overbrook School for the Blind. We watched as sighted people had their first awkward interactions with him. He laughs when he describes how often people raise their hands when he asks questions during his new hire orientation briefings. Well-meaning commuters sometimes escort him to the wheelchair zone on the train platform. It took me a while to realize he’s not offended by questions like “Did you see my email?”

Here’s Victor’s video profile:

Spend any amount of time with Victor and you realize that his blindness doesn’t really make him all that different from anyone else – except that his computer talks to him. Really, really fast.

Read more:

• Victor’s post about screenreaders
• Victor’s post about the launch of our Accessibility Lab in Bangalore
• An interview with Victor about his life and music

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Video credits: producer, Nicki Dugan; cinematographer, Brad Williams; director/editor, Ricky Montalvo
Photo by gingervitis

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

If you’ve seen “The Godfather,” chances are you might like other Marlon Brando movies. Or films about gangsters. Or those directed by Francis Ford Coppola. But will you like “Napoleon Dynamite”?

This is the central problem posed by the Netflix Prize. Netflix is offering $1 million in prize money to anyone who can substantially improve (by more than 10 percent) the accuracy of its movie recommendation engine. While Netflix suggests movies based on your ratings history, the company isn’t satisfied with how well it can predict what you’ll like.

At Yahoo! Labs, this is just the kind of crazy difficult problem we love to take on. For scientists, it’s a pure challenge, requiring deep study and experimentation across a variety of fields, such as machine learning and data mining.

And for Yahoo! as a whole, these types of scientific problems also happen to be a critical element of what we most want to succeed at: connecting you with the content and information you most want in your life – even if you don’t know it yet.

That’s why we couldn’t be happier to pass along the news that Yehuda Koren, one of our scientists at Yahoo!’s Israel Lab, is part of the first qualifying team for the Netflix Prize.

Yehuda’s team, BellKor’s Pragmatic Chaos, reached first place on the Netflix Prize leaderboard on June 26, with an improvement of 10.05 percent. Achieving a more than ten percent improvement in the quality of movie recommendations is no drop in the bucket. It took Yehuda and his teammates three years to achieve and no other team has matched it yet.

Congratulations to Yehuda and his team. In the past few weeks alone, in addition to the Netflix Prize, Yehuda and his colleagues also received best paper prizes at two of the most important scientific conferences (ACM SIGMOD and ACM SIGKDD) for computer science and the Internet. Yahoo! researchers Christopher Olston, Shubham Chopra, Utkarsh Srivastava, Ashwin Machanavajjhala and Bee-Chung Chen, were also recognized for contributions to the science of how to better query and mine data, which will ultimately make it easier for you to get things done on the Web and beyond.

We may not yet have solved every problem the Internet has thrown our way, but at the very least, you should start feeling a lot more confident about those movies in your Netflix queue.

Prabhakar Raghavan
Head of Yahoo! Labs

What do you do if the world’s tallest building stands in your city? Try to run up its stairs as fast as you can!

A group of Yahoos from Taiwan recently banded together to run up the Taipei 101, which weighs in as the world’s tallest skyscraper at 101 stories with 2,046 steps. That’s 508 meters or one third of a mile… straight up. It was part of a masochistic race called the “Taipei 101 Run Up,” which pits teams against each other to see who can reach the top first. The 20 participating teams included major brands like Coca-Cola, Nike, and Bayer.

Sporting purple Yahoo! T-shirts, our team included a few senior Yahoo! executives, including Ari Balogh, our executive vice president of Products and chief technology officer (visiting from California); Rose Tsou, senior vice president of our Asia region; and Charlene Hung, general manager of Yahoo! Taiwan.

So, how’d they do in this ultimate Stairmaster challenge? They placed fifth, just a few spots behind last year’s second place finish (when they lost out to the fire department — the only team you really want passing you). And the fastest Yahoo? That would be Ari, whose addiction to energy bars clearly paid off. He scaled the building’s 101 stories in just 18:26.

Here are some photos from the race and sweet victory:

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Douglas Crockford performs tests on human subjects. He likes to make them struggle and then learn from their experience. But it’s all for a good cause.

Douglas is Yahoo!’s resident JavaScript software architect. He has literally written the book on the coding language and his job involves training engineers at Yahoo! and industry-wide to use the code effectively. But he’s long lamented that there isn’t a good reference book for beginners. So he decided to take matters into his own hands and write it himself. But he quickly faced the dilemma of every expert – trying to think like a beginner.

Enter Mountain View High School.

Douglas decided that teaching a course in the principles of computer programming could prove mutually beneficial. So as a school volunteer, he worked with administrators to recruit a handful of willing students (mostly seniors) whose only prerequisite was experience in calculus. For most, this was their first exposure to software. Before long, they were thrown into the deep end of the pool to learn about values, variables, functions, recursion and other complexities of programming. By the end of the 12 weeks, the kids had conquered the basics and Douglas had experienced JavaScript through the eyes of a novice. Everybody won.

Now, this group may not have been statistically significant –- kids growing up in the Silicon Valley get plenty of exposure to technology, thanks to parents who often work at industry giants. And these students are headed to hallowed institutions like Cal Poly, Northwestern, and UC Berkeley to chase engineering degrees. But, nonetheless, they taught Douglas a lot about how to learn.

When Douglas sets off to write the book, I’m sure you’ll find some 17-year-olds in the acknowledgments. Also to be acknowledged are Mountain View High School Principal Keith Moody (also, incidentally, a former Raider defensive back) and teacher Madeline Miraglia, who made Douglas’ volunteer project possible.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Usually what happens at a company all-hands, stays at a company all-hands. But sometimes there’s great stuff that seems too good to keep under wraps.

Take Mitch Spolan, for example. We have a phrase around here that describes someone who’s loyal to the core — they “bleed purple.” That’s Mitch in a nutshell. He’s a 10-year Yahoo! veteran who’s seen it all — the good, the bad, the ugly, and the awesome. And he’s embodied the definition of pride throughout. And in this presentation, Mitch gave abut 13,000 people a bevy of reasons to share that pride.

You have to forget for a moment that he’s a sales guy (he was just promoted to head of our North American field sales organization) because what you’re about to watch isn’t some guy just trying to cut a deal. This video helps you understand what it means to bleed purple.

And you’ll also learn a thing or two about measuring social impact by a factor of Obamas.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

A month and a half in the saddle and today I have the perfect excuse to get blogging.

I’ve been on a whirlwind tour for the last six weeks, talking with everybody from executive leaders to the guys who configured my laptop. I’ve been in student mode, slowly getting smarter about what makes this place tick. And most recently, I’ve been gathering information on what it’s going to take to get Yahoo! to a great place as an organization –- and one that brings you killer products.

People here have impressed the hell out of me. They’re smart, dedicated, passionate, driven, and really nice. There’s so much great energy and frankly lots of optimism. But there’s also plenty that has bogged this company down. For starters, you’d be amazed at how complicated some things are here.

So today I’m rolling out a new management structure that I believe will make Yahoo! a lot faster on its feet. For us working at Yahoo!, it means everything gets simpler. We’ll be able to make speedier decisions, the notorious silos are gone, and we have a renewed focus on the customer. For you using Yahoo! every day, it will better enable us to deliver products that make you say, “Wow.”

I’ve noticed that a lot of us on the inside don’t spend enough time looking to the outside. That’s why I’m creating a new Customer Advocacy group. After getting a lot of angry calls at my office from frustrated customers, I realized we could do a better job of listening to and supporting you. Our Customer Care team does an incredible job with the amazing number of people who come to them, but they need better resources. So we’re investing in that. After all, you deserve the very best.

We’re also leaning on this team to make sure we’re all hearing the voice of our customers (consumers and advertisers). I’m singularly focused on providing you with awesome products. Period. The kind that get you so excited, you have to tell someone about them. Whether on your desktop, your mobile device, or even your TV.

And that takes a real understanding of what you want/need/love/hate, how you’re using our products, and what you find simple, intuitive, easy and fun. Who wants innovation for innovation’s sake if it doesn’t make your life easier, more efficient, more productive? So expect us to hear you better and take better care of you.

Finally, a note about our brand. It’s one of our biggest assets. Mention Yahoo! practically anywhere in the world, and people yodel. But in the past few years, we haven’t been as clear in showing the world what the Yahoo! brand stands for. We’re going to change that. Look for this company’s brand to kick ass again.

Big thanks to the many of you who’ve reached out with positive comments. It’s clear people want Yahoo! to succeed. I’ll try to pop by here again soon, though probably not too soon. I have a pretty long to-do list.

Carol Bartz
CEO

One of the best kept Yahoo! secrets is our office at the North Pole — or at least really, really close to it. In the city of Trondheim, Norway, a group of 40 dedicated search engineers work day and night to develop one of our core technology platforms.

A huge advantage of having an office in such a cold and deserted corner of the world is, of course, that there is little else to do than go to work. The hazardous environment is, however, a big drawback — blizzards, temperatures well below even the lowest of comfort zones and, worst of all, the hungry polar bears (isbjørn) that sneak around town looking for food or a warm place to hide.

So while your biggest commuting worry is how heavy the traffic will be, these guys — wishing they had Kevlar coats and rifles on their scooters — have to ask themselves: “Will I even make it to work today?”

Could this be for real? Do these daredevils from Norway deserve high-risk pay and additional insurance packages, or are they just pulling our legs? See their photo evidence at Flickr and let us know what you think.

Eirik Refsdal
Engineer, Yahoo! Search

The Big Game is on Sunday. It’s the culmination of a season of well-researched drafts, strategic trades, painful injuries, trash talking, stats galore, victories and defeats… in your fantasy football league.

Every year, more than 12 million people reach for computer mice along with their remotes as they play fantasy football. Yahoo! Sports alone has more than four million players. That’s a lot of people demanding perfection when it comes to their league drafting process, how fast they can get their hands on data and stats, and how easily they can manage their rosters in that critical hour before the coin toss.

Though the leagues ended with the playoffs, we thought we’d give you a video look at the team of engineers that kept you on top of your game -– the people who toiled on Sunday afternoons and Monday nights to ensure that servers didn’t crash under the weight of all those stats. The team that brought you all the best new tools to help you make smarter calls. The guys (and gals) who, like you, live and breathe sports — nary a day goes by without at least one football jersey in the cube bullpen. In fact, quite a few of them have been working on Yahoo! Sports for more than ten years.

Whether you’re a Cardinals or a Steelers fan, may your guacamole be fresh, your beer plentiful, and your pizza hot. For once, Yahoo! Sports engineers will be watching the game right along with you.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Filmed and edited by Bart Bishoff, Yahoo! Broadcast Bureau

One hundred million people. It’s the population of America’s 60 largest cities combined (from NYC to Toledo). It’s about three million more than the size of this year’s record-breaking Super Bowl audience. And it’s the number of people who visit the Yahoo! Homepage every month.

I’ve always wondered what it’s like to program news content for that kind of a massive audience. (Let’s just say Yodel Anecdotal’s readership has a ways to go.) After all, you’re basically responsible for informing roughly one in every two American Internet users about what’s happening in our world…and influencing what they talk about over cube walls. What does that responsibility feel like? How do they stay on top of the fire hose of news and then decide what gets one of those precious links? Who is “they” and what prepares them for this big job? How do they know what will click? What was it like to cover this year’s Election?

I took a camera backstage to answer these questions and more. Enjoy this up-close-and-personal look inside the Yahoo! Homepage newsroom.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

Filmed and edited by Bart Bishoff, Yahoo! Broadcast Bureau