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

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

It’s not that I’m lazy or don’t care. I tell my son a hundred times a day to turn his bedroom light off when he’s not in his room, my security lights are on a timer so I don’t forget to turn them off, I’ve learned how to brush my teeth with a few drops of water, I use organic cleaners, I eat organic food, etc.

But I’ve found that there just aren’t that many useful and truly ‘green’ consumer products on the market.

I’d love to own a small hybrid car but I don’t think my wife, two kids, baby, blind black lab and a I would fit very well, even though I am on a diet. I recently found some interesting looking coasters made from recycled CD’s, but just because I think it’s cool to have a Def Leppard coaster on my coffee table doesn’t really help anything, does it?

Yahoo! Green’s Make it Green campaign (launched last month) could tangibly help change all of this by inviting regular people from around the world to submit ideas that will improve our lives and ‘green up’ our planet.

You don’t have to be a scientist to enter and you don’t have to have a patented product either. That’s because Yahoo! has teamed up with the company I work for, Edison Nation. We have tons of expertise and experience reviewing products, handling intellectual property, and partnering with manufacturers and retailers to put products onto store shelves.

If your idea is selected, you will earn $2,500, a share of sales for up to twenty years and possibly be featured on PBS’ Emmy award winning invention show Everyday Edisons.

So if you think you have a great green idea, don’t delay — Make it Green ends June 30th!

Kermit and the planet thank you.

Michael Cable
Director, Edison Nation

Stephen Colbert doesn’t shave his head for just anybody. But sometimes that’s what it takes to get attention for a worthy cause.

This week, Comedy Central’s Colbert Report is broadcasting from Baghdad’s Camp Victory in support of U.S. troops serving in Iraq. In a show of solidarity, he’s now sporting a high-and-tight haircut. But he’s also putting the spotlight on a different part of the military –- the children who make great sacrifices of their own while their parents serve our country.

That’s where my organization, DonorsChoose.org, comes in. Together we hope to give these kids a leg up. I founded DonorsChoose.org nine years ago after witnessing the scarcity of materials in our country’s public schools, I never could have imagined the extent to which American citizen philanthropists have responded. In that time, we’ve raised over $34 million for public school classroom projects around the country.

As part of our “Support Our Troops” campaign, launched in partnership with Colbert, DonorsChoose.org is running a friendly competition among the Armed Forces –- Army, Air Force, Marines, Navy and Coast Guard — to see which branch’s supporters can have the biggest impact on classrooms. As of today, we have raised more than $130,000, and the Army is barely hanging on to the lead (check out the leaderboard as the tension builds in real-time).

Literally hundreds of projects have been submitted by teachers at military-serving schools across the country. Just a couple to inspire you:

1. Say Sí to the Army!
2. From A to Bravo Zulu!
3. Military Students Travel the World – Through Books!
4. General Lee’s Black Bears

I’d also like to give a shout out to Yahoo! for creating the Colbert Avatars. Now you can dress yourself as Stephen Colbert and accessorize with things like an eagle, bear, Colbert Nation hat, Che Colbert tshirt, fireplace, and a desk, and help us spread the word about the Support Our Troops campaign.

The good news is you don’t have to shave your head to help. Just please go donate to one of the many classroom projects waiting for funding. And if you need further inspiration, check out the video clips from this week’s Colbert Report.

Charles Best
Founder and CEO, DonorsChoose.org

The Yahoo! International Journalism Fellowship at Stanford was established for people like Violet, journalists from countries where there are strong challenges to a free press. Yahoo! and the Knight Fellowships agreed that we needed to support journalists who were directly or indirectly under attack, and so we created the fellowship in 2006, with a generous gift from Yahoo!. (The Knight Fellowships itself has been around since 1966. A young Jerry Yang first met with the Knight Fellows in the spring of 1995.)

The first Yahoo! Fellow was Imtiaz Ali, from Pakistan, where journalism is a deadly occupation. But there could hardly be country that fits our definition better than Zimbabwe, where President Robert Mugabe’s regime has systematically and brutally cracked down on anyone who disagreed with it — opposition politicians, the press, human rights activists and others. Violet Gonda has been banned from the country (actually, the justice minister said the country would welcome her back — but only in prison) so she works in exile, at a small radio station, SW Radio Africa, in London. This station broadcasts uncensored news about Zimbabwe back into the country by any means possible, including text messaging. (Want to get a taste of her work? Listen to these two interviews, one with a Mugabe spokesman and the other with Desmond Tutu.) We were proud to have her for the year at Stanford, where she studied the development of news media in emerging democracies. Now she is back in London. If there’s a God in heaven, someday she will someday be able to return to her homeland.

And as she leaves, we are ready to welcome Abebe Gellaw, of Ethiopia, who will be the 2008-09 Yahoo! International Fellow. Like Violet, Abebe is in exile. He left after the Ethiopian government started rounding up and arresting journalists in November 2005. He is editor-in chief of Addis Voice, a London-based website devoted independent news about Ethiopia. He will arrive in August for his year.

Journalists are under attack around the world, and organizations like the Committee To Protect Journalists make sure that those attacks are brought to light. It makes me feel proud that the Knight Fellowships and Yahoo! have teamed up to provide a fellowship at Stanford every year for someone who is bearing the brunt of those attacks.

Jim Bettinger
Director, John S. Knight Fellowship for Professional Journalists
Stanford University

As part of Yahoo! for Good’s Purple Acts of Kindness program, a monthly initiative that surprises and delights our local community with random acts of generosity, we reached out to Yahoos all over the country to invite them to share a story about someone they know who could put a $50 commuter check to good use. In just a matter of hours, we gave away commuter checks to 100 deserving individuals. Here are just a few of their inspiring stories:

• “I’d like to get commuter checks for my girlfriend. She commutes every day from San Jose to Oakland on the Capitol Corridor train. She wakes up at 5am every morning to catch the limited schedule. She doesn’t get home till 7:30. She could take the easy way out & drive everyday to save time, but she really wants to help the environment by taking another car off the road.”
• “My girlfriend currently commutes back and forth from Fremont to Oakland. She is a single Mom who is a nurse for the Children’s Hospital in Oakland. She has to be at work at 5:00 to 3:30.I know she could use the pass to save on both money and sleep. =)”
• “I’d like to give my dad a commuter check because at age 58, he has taken up riding Caltrain and his bike to and from work (3 mile bike ride to the station, Caltrain from Hillsdale to San Jose, and then an 8 mile bike ride to his office).”

To find out how you can deal with high gas prices and help the environment at the same time, check out these tips on Yahoo! Green.

Connie Chan
Associate Manager, Yahoo! for Good

Photo from richardmasoner

Much to my wife’s delight, among other things I contributed were five pairs of sneakers and athletic shoes and I was able to actually watch people pick them up and give them a new home. (Yes, people WILL wear other people’s shoes…) Hopefully they will get some great use and their new owners will think hard about what THEY could give up to turn their personal trash into someone else’s treasure.

I’m told Yahoos brought in more than 2,000 items from closets and basements throughout the Bay Area that might otherwise have been destined for landfills. The more interesting things I saw included a vintage map of Silicon Valley businesses from 2000, a red lacy bra (which seemed to disappear quickly), last-generation Tivos, Rockem Sockem Robots, vacuum cleaners, a complete set of Star Trek: Next Generation VHS tapes, bunny slippers, fleeces galore, Yahoo! schwag (Yahoo! Chicago stickers, anyone?), and gently used sporting equipment. Items that had not seen the light of day for years were suddenly adopted by new guardians, who promised to put them into immediate use. Although I think the snow skis might have to wait until next season…

We duplicated this fair in six California, New York, and Oregon offices. And whatever wasn’t claimed was carted away by local charities like the Salvation Army.

So if you see me around campus with size 10.5 Adidas shell-toes, know that they will be well cared for and infused with the spirit of giving.

Hmm… I wonder what size Jerry wears?…

Here are some photos and a video recap:

Lucas Mast
Senior PR Manager
Connected Life

With the title of “Commute Coordinator,” Danielle is likely a maverick in Corporate America. She’s not only a cheerleader for a greener way of life (literally walking the walk), she’s there to help every Yahoo figure out the most practical way from Point A to Point B. And she has a good answer for just about every excuse you can come up with: “What if my kid gets sick in the middle of the day and I have no car?” Our guaranteed ride home program won’t cost you a dime. “But I’ll get sweaty on my bike!” We’ve got showers. “No one else works my hours.” Let me check my database of carpoolers.

Here’s a report NBC just ran about Danielle and our commute program, inspired by photos she took on a recent commute from San Francisco.

With fossil fuel flirting with $4 a gallon, you need to get yourself a Danielle.

Props to Paul Stamatiou, former Yodel intern, for his great how-to on embedding Flickr slideshows.

Nicki Dugan
Blog Editor

September 19, 2003 should be memorable as my son Davis’ fifth birthday. Instead, we remember it more clearly as the day we started the very long recovery from Hurricane Isabel, which had hit our small Virginia town the day before. We lost just about everything in the bottom three feet of our garage to floodwater.

Several months later, I read about the local Yorktown Freecycle Yahoo! group and quickly joined. I immediately saw how it could help my town in its recovery efforts (which is, I might add, STILL ongoing five years later as friends and neighbors continue to shell out to repair floors and foundations).

The group proved useful just a few days after I joined. I had posted a want for a lawnmower and within 48 hours, I heard from “uubooklady.” When she let me know that her husband had recently bought a new mower to replace their 1985 Toro and that we were welcome to it, I was elated. I’ve always been happy to use hand-me-downs, and Deron Beal’s brilliant idea to use modern technology to share belongings locally via the Freecycle Network was a perfect match for my earth-friendly leanings.

When my husband Jim went to retrieve his “new” mower, lo and behold, his work colleague Ellis came pushing it out of the garage! These men worked mere feet from one another at NASA, yet they would have never made the lawnmower connection if it hadn’t been for Yahoo! Groups and the Freecycle Network.

I started FreecyclePoquoson for my own town that very week and have been happily moderating it ever since. We’ve grown to almost 600 members and we connect neighbors on a daily basis.

I’ve given away furniture, kitchen items, clothing, toys, and office supplies. I’ve received puzzles, games, craft supplies, used egg cartons (we raise hens and reuse cartons), even empty Kool-Aid Jammers (which I sew into very cool purses). I also get nearly-expired bread each week from a guy I met on Freecycle, who rescues it from grocery stores. I’m now known as “the bread lady” because I put a giant stack (we’re talking over 100 loaves) on my porch for neighbors who might be too proud to get food from the food pantry but are happy to keep it from being tossed into the landfill.

There are literally MILLIONS of similar stories about how helpful the Freecycle Network has been in people’s lives. I’ve seen time again how, while Freecycle often begins with an experience of a person receiving, it inevitably turns into discovering the joy of giving.

Freecycle, through Yahoo!, makes every day Earth Day and provides a modern, free, easy to use format to prove true the old adage, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” It sure beats spending hours having a yard sale or trolling sales!

Davis is nine now. He’s never known anything other than listing his old “stuff” on Freecycle. I don’t know when Poquoson will fully recover, but I do know that Freecycle and Yahoo! have and will continue to play an important part in the healing process… both for our community and for Mother Earth.

Traci-Dale
Yahoo! Groups user
Moderator, FreecyclePoquoson

Our goal is to inspire scholars to explore new ways to use technology for good, particularly in navigating the complexities that go hand-in-hand with the shrinking globe that the Internet has created. These are complexities we at Yahoo! are well familiar with. While we’ve been at the forefront of opening up new communications and information frontiers for citizens of the world, we’ve also seen the challenges that come when these technologies are used by governments for other purposes – those that run counter to our values.

Although our challenges have been widely reported, the full scope of efforts we’ve been making to address freedom of expression and other human rights issues may not be as well known. So I thought I’d take an opportunity to set out some examples:

• Industry Code of Conduct: We’ve been working with industry counterparts, academics, human rights organizations, and socially responsible investors to develop a code of conduct that would guide leading global technology and communications companies operating in challenging markets. We hope to announce the results of our collective efforts in the near future.
• Academic Fellowships: In addition to the Georgetown Fellowship program, we also initiated the Yahoo! International Journalism Fellowship at Stanford in conjunction with the John S. Knight Fellowships program. It focuses on journalists from press-restrictive countries, allowing them to withdraw from their environments for a year of study. The first fellow came from Pakistan and this year’s fellow is from Zimbabwe.
• Human Rights Fund: Recognizing the plight of unfairly imprisoned political dissidents, we established a Human Rights Fund last month to provide humanitarian and legal support for these individuals and their families. We’ve partnered with noted human rights activist Harry Wu, who spent 19 years in a Chinese labor camp, to administer the fund. It will also support educational efforts on human rights. We’re so grateful to have Harry’s partnership in this.
• Policy Dialogue: While we’re committed to advancing human rights globally, there are practical limits to corporate diplomacy. That’s why we’ve been urging government officials in the United States and abroad to advocate for policy change. We believe governments have the most leverage to influence the decision-making of other governments.
• Advocating for Freedom: Having followed these issues intently and having now met personally with the families of dissidents, I understand our responsibility in advocating for their release. In fact, just yesterday, I went to Capitol Hill with Harry Wu to meet with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Dianne Feinstein to discuss these issues. And I recently sent a letter to Condoleezza Rice before her visit to Beijing, urging support in seeking freedom for Shi Tao and Wang Xiaoning. With the Summer Games approaching, there seems to be a perfect window of opportunity for exerting diplomatic leverage. Senior Yahoo! leaders have also met with high-level Chinese and U.S. officials to directly appeal for release. We’ll continue to pursue this doggedly.

We’ve learned important lessons from our experience in China. We hope our experiences and plans can help guide other companies and ultimately influence the emergence of more open societies around the globe — when technology can truly be used to make the world a better place.

Jerry Yang
CEO and Chief Yahoo

Having been heralded by the daily late afternoon thunder and lightning storm, the clouds rolled in to create a dark and moonless humid night. There were 18 of us on our nightly turtle watch. Without our flashlights — or as our British friends would say, “torches” — it was nearly impossible for me to see more then a few feet away.

Pulga (that’s flea in Spanish), the neighborhood dog, started barking and howling. Despite our leader’s no light rule (“don’t scare the turtles”), the flashlights came on to reveal the oddest creature any of us had ever seen. It was about three feet long, mostly white with a black saddle. But it had no visible face — just a long skinny snout. Startled by Pulga, it stood on its hind legs and began a funny kung-fu-like dance while making a kind of eerie screeching-howling sound. Fortunately for all involved, it quickly decided flight was better than fight and scampered off into the jungle.

We all stood there amazed and then laughing at what we had just seen, not knowing for sure if it was for real or some sort of live Muppet show. We found out later we had just had the rare privilege of seeing a Tamandua (banded or lesser anteater).

Our Tamandua sighting was just one of many different and wonderful experiences we enjoyed during our nearly two-week tour of Costa Rica, thanks to Yahoo!. I’m a second-grade teacher from Butler Creek Elementary school, located in Gresham, Oregon, and I had the privilege of being chosen by Yahoo! to participate in a free eco-trip with G.A.P Adventures. I was nominated by my school because of my work with our environmental club. Choosing a trip from the menu of fantastic adventures G.A.P offers was difficult, but my husband Tom and I decided on Costa Rica because this particular tour included a week of volunteering at a sea turtle protection project. We both prefer experiencing the local culture first-hand rather than spending our time at a resort. This also seemed to fit the eco theme. Did we get it right!

Our group of 17 strangers from England, Canada, and different parts of the U.S. went on an incredible journey that included a sloth rescue, monkey sightings, an up-close-and-personal sea turtle egg-laying experience, horseback riding, volcano viewing, a jungle cruise, white water rafting, zip-lining, and much more.

As I think about how this trip will affect me as a teacher and what I’ll bring back to my students, I remember the day we visited the local elementary school at Playa Matapalo. I was able to sit with a small group of children, about the same age that I teach, and despite the language barrier, it quickly became apparent to me that I was talking to the same kids I see every day. There was the jokester, the shy one, the thoughtful one — the same mix that is in my class. It truly is a small world. A world we all must appreciate more before there is nothing left to appreciate. Whether we are protecting sea turtles or salmon, pine trees or palm trees, we must leave for our children the wonders that we enjoy today.

I am very grateful to Yahoo! for their commitment to our environment and to the next generation. Through campaigns like Be a Better Planet or product efforts like your Autos Green Center, you are helping us all be more aware of alternatives to our more destructive habits. The Internet can be a powerful tool that can help us all appreciate the world we have and environmentally responsible companies like Yahoo! are at the forefront of that effort. I truly appreciate the opportunity that Yahoo! gave me to explore just a tiny but important part of our world.

Mary Nemmert
2nd Grade Teacher
Butler Creek Elementary School
Gresham, Oregon

My team, Yahoo! for Good, had the privilege of previewing An Inconvenient Truth as a result of our Earth Day efforts in April. We even got to hear from Al himself — he was a surprise guest at a theater filled with only 50 people. He was so passionate and, get this, witty. Where was that in 2000?

Our team left the theater truly transformed. We wanted to ensure that the most people possible saw this film. We even arranged for hundreds of low-income high-school students in Los Angeles and New York City to see it opening week.

Fast-forward to the DVD release. What a no-brainer to make the film available to the youngest (and sometimes most powerful) influencers. So we donated more than 220 copies of An Inconvenient Truth to high-school science teachers in neighboring communities of Yahoo! offices — from California to Oregon to New York. After all, it’s required viewing for all students in Norway and Sweden.

After hearing that the National Science Teachers Association (NSTA) rejected a donation of 50,000 DVDs from the movie’s producers allegedly for fear of losing corporate funding, we knew this Purple Act of Kindness was more important than ever. It seems tragic that education is such a low public funding priority in the U.S. that the NSTA has to worry about risking capital campaign contributions from the likes of Exxon Mobile for simply educating kids about global warming. But alas, that’s another story…

In the meantime, Yahoo! will continue to put the environment front and center and educate people on how they can protect it. It’ll do my heart good.

Erin Carlson
Senior Manager, Yahoo! for Good

When I got back to the office, we fired up our Yahoo! Purple Acts of Kindness engine. (A Purple Act is an unexpected act that delights the recipient and supports our local communities — more here). Yahoo! has a modest monthly budget for these types of occasions — when a small gesture puts a smile on someone’s face for at least a day. So, this past week, Yahoo! furtively picked up the parking tab for nearly 1,500 cancer patients at Stanford. After all, it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. We figured it was the least we could do.

BTW: Here’s a photo of my brother, Yahoo! SVP Brad Garlinghouse, who shaved his head in solidarity. (He asked his barber to spare a few hairs, but don’t worry — the “Y” only lasted a day.)

Meg Garlinghouse
Director, Yahoo! for Good