A Look at Yahoo! Messenger for Visually Impaired Users

Close your eyes. Place your hands on the keyboard and try to find the mouse. You want to use Yahoo! Messenger, but you’re not sure where to go, how to type, or where to click…

For a moment, you just sat in the seat of a visually impaired user who cannot rely on a mouse or look at the screen the way sighted users do. So how would you use Yahoo! Messenger if you were visually impaired?

I spent some time recently with Victor Tsaran, a program manager on our Accessibility team here at Yahoo!. The team’s charter is to work with product teams, including Messenger, to make our technologies as accessible as possible for disabled users.

With the help of screen reader software, a visually impaired user can enjoy the Internet and products like Yahoo! Messenger. This kind of software responds to a user’s key commands. It scans the page or application and reads the content aloud. In this way, visually impaired users can “hear” where they are on the screen. There are several major screen reading programs available. Job Access for Windows with Speech (JAWS) is a popular one that works well with Yahoo! Messenger.

Because it reads the words aloud, a screen reader can sound wordy to people unaccustomed to listening to it. But the visually impaired user who is adept at listening to the reader can set the audio playback at a lightening pace. When Victor demonstrated how he uses Yahoo! Messenger with the JAWS screen reader, it sounded to me like supersonic gibberish. Thankfully, he used a command to slow down the audio so my less nimble ears could decipher it.

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