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

The world wasn’t built with disabled people in mind. Too many bumps and corners and narrow spaces. Too many objects just out of reach, too high or too low. Sights and sounds hard to see and hear. And that’s just the real world. The world of the Internet, initially, was a lot worse.

But not anymore.

Back in 1984, while I was at Apple, we discovered that the just-announced and beautifully designed Macintosh computer was, in some ways, terribly designed for much of the disabled population. One way we demonstrated this to our hardware and software engineers was to have them sit together, each in front of the Macintosh they’d been instrumental in designing, and do the following: “Put your hands in your pocket, put a pencil in your mouth, and type a 2-line memo.”

That simple simulation eventually led to the identification and fixing of more than 40 obstacles that were originally designed as conveniences for the average user. More than any lecture could have accomplished, the real-life simulation of disabled experiences led not only to the increased usability of the Macintosh, but also, in the words of one software engineer, to a new, more inclusive, way of seeing the world: “I’ll never view my work in the same way again.”

It’s useful to mention that the fixes—what we termed “electronic curb-cuts”—were, for the most part, quite simple to make. The much more difficult challenge was to recognize that the accessibility problems existed in the first place.

And so it is with websites. Even Yahoo!.

Which is why we’ve just opened the Yahoo! Accessibility Lab, a place where engineers, designers, and product managers can experience for themselves how disabled users navigate the web. And sometimes, how they can’t.

At this point, the Accessibility Lab is in its formative stage; we’re still learning how to make it as valuable a resource as possible. As a result, it is only available—for now—to Yahoo! employees. Here is part of what we’ve said to them in announcing this new on-campus location:

No matter what your position is at Yahoo!, we invite you to wander in, look around, play a little, watch a little, try a little, borrow a little… and then come back again. And again.

Come in and be blind for a while and learn how to buy a car at Yahoo! Autos. Or be paralyzed from the neck down and use Yahoo! Mail or play Yahoo! Games. Or be deaf, or learning disabled, or non-verbal. These are the kinds of experiences you can have in the Lab.

Our goal is to help you understand what it means to design products that are accessible to all of Yahoo!’s customers. Products that are usable. Enjoyable. Delightful. And inclusive.

In addition to simulating the disabled experience, the Accessibility Lab also provides a growing collection of books and videos that we hope will help visitors become more comfortable with the culture of disability. And help Yahoos keep disabled kids and adults clearly in mind as they design and code.

Alan Brightman
Senior Policy Director, Special Communities

Alan is the author of many books about the disabled experience, including his recent “DisabilityLand” (SelectBooks, 2008).