Sad; Yahoo we can do better than this
Kestrell posted something that made me really sad. Why I wish Yahoo would just stop trying to b***s*** me that they care about accessibility expresses her frustration using the Yahoo groups product.
As someone who’s spent a lot of time trying to improve the state of accessibility on the web, I find it especially disheartening that the company I work for has an upset frustrated user. However in order to fix a problem you have to know that it exists. I regularly read Kestrell’s blog, and when I saw this post I was both surprised and upset. The first thing I did was reach out to a couple of people who also work at Yahoo. I expected that same surprise and upset I had felt. Instead, I was told that they had already seen this, and were looking in to it.
Without wanting to talk about internal goings on too much, I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Yahoo does care. I am part of a group of people who actively promote disability needs within the company. We admit we aren’t perfect. Our products aren’t either. However, by gum, we do care. If you need to find the right person at Yahoo contact me and I’ll find them for you.
Looking further at the points of the post CAPTCHAs are a tricky subject. My good friend Matt May wrote something a while back for the W3C about the inaccessibility of CAPTCHA. While we can’t do away with CAPTCHAs completely because of spam Kestrell notes that other forms of CAPTCHAs are ok.
Matt’s article highlights that CAPTCHAs will always exclude some people, but it’s about making that group as small as possible and improving the email/phone support we give to those users. An effectively implemented standard solution that everyone plugs into could work really well here. For example, login is a standard across all Yahoo products. The login is not something each product does differently they all just add a little branding to an existing, optimised solution. It seems like CAPTCHAs would be an excellent candidate for this as well. Whenever someone’s identity needs to be validated a standard well tested service would be employed.
This has been a bit of a random collection of thoughts and responses. However, I just want to summarise. Yahoo people do care, I am here caring right now. Yahoo have some issues that need to be sorted out, but I am recognising they exist and that Yahoo can improve. CAPTCHAs are something we need to deal with as a company and find a solution to which is massively more inclusive.
These opinions are my own, and I am not speaking for Yahoo in any official capacity.
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accessibility, yahoo, captcha
