Yahoo! hates blind people
Actually, we don’t. But that’s what many people think. The problem is, the new Yahoo! Mail Beta isn’t terribly user friendly towards blind people. In fact, it’s beyond not friendly…it’s downright hostile.
There are two issues at work here: 1) CAPTCHA and 2) advanced DHTML. Let’s talk a little bit about both:
CAPTCHA
What on earth is CAPTCHA? The long version is CAPTCHA is a “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart” [Wikipedia]. What that means in English is that it’s a test to help us tell the difference between a human and a machine. Humans we like. Humans are (mostly) moral people with money. Yahoo! likes money (you gotta pay the bills) and so we don’t want to turn humans away. So we issue a test consisting of a few characters and we require the human to enter those characters into a form field and submit the form. Now’s where it gets hard.
Computers are amoral and do the bidding of their masters, except when you’re programming and you have a deadline in 15 minutes. Unfortunately, there are some bad humans out there who want to make computers do bad things…like send spam. Yahoo! hates spam. We hate it more than just about anything. We’ll do just about anything to stop spam. That’s the problem. Remember that test I mentioned earlier? We have to make it hard enough to read that a computer won’t be able to decipher it. If the computer can’t decipher it, then it can’t inject spam into your mailbox. Unfortunately, the computers have gotten REALLY good at identifying most legible forms of writing. So we have these wonderfully nasty images that we expect humans to be able to read. Unfortunately, blind or not, they’re not always the easiest things to read.
Blind users have it the worst. If you have the gift of sight, you’ve probably got at least a 50/50 chance of being able to read the test. If you can’t see or if you have really bad eyesight, you’re basically out of luck. This is a tolerable problem to have during account registration. One phone call to Yahoo! and you should be able to have the matter cleared up. It’s not tolerable when you’re trying to send mail. There needs to be some improvement here. Either audio CAPTCHA’s in addition to visual CAPTCHA’s or some other form of validation. The problem is, I can say it just like it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. But it’s not. It’s very difficult to fool the computers. So this problem won’t go away overnight. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the reality of the situation. In a perfect world we’d remove the CAPTCHA and everybody would forward chain letters to their heart’s delight. Unfortunately, there are those mother *#&$%@’s out there who like to turn a dime by peddling their smut to your inbox…so we just can’t do that right now.
DHTML
Yahoo! Mail Beta uses HTML and JavaScript so complex that it’s very difficult for most humans to process…let alone screen readers. Screen readers are used by people who are blind or have very poor eyesight. The vast majority of the web isn’t written in braille, though it could be (braille is supported in unicode). That means there has to be screen reading programs that can translate written word pages for the blind.
Applications like Yahoo! Mail Beta make this very difficult. The beta updates sections of the page dynamically. The page is broken up into many parts, making it difficult for readers to find a contiguous bit of text to read. In short, it’s just not that easy. That’s where the current Yahoo! Mail (non beta) comes in. It is much easier to read by screen readers because it’s mostly static HTML (I’m totally making an assumption there, if someone knows better that the current mail doesn’t support screen readers well, correct me). For most DHTML rich applications in the future, this is likely the way it will have to be. A really rich experience for most people and a more machine readable experience for blind people. It would be a travesty if Yahoo! pulled the plug on the current Yahoo! Mail. It would essentially leave blind users without an option to retrieve or send mail. The people at Yahoo! are smarter than that (I know, I hear them complain about usability issues for the blind all the time), so I can’t imagine they would be dumb enough to pull the plug on the current mail without having something better to offer to users with screen readers. The day they do that is the day I ask to be put on a different project (or the day I ask for my walking papers).
When I worked at Excite on mail we made a change to the compose page. We changed an HTML submit button to an image. Almost immediately, I received email from one of my blind users complaining that she was no longer able to send mail using lynx. We quickly put in a fix. We’re not evil. We don’t have some grudge against blind people. We just don’t always understand what it’s like to experience our applications from someone else’s perspective.
If you’re a blind webmail user, send me some feedback. How would your ideal webmail work? What are some good pointers for developing web applications for blind users (desktop applications too, for that matter)? Are web browsers and screen readers the right way to go or would a custom desktop application work better? Does anyone actually use the braille portion of unicode?
Respond in the comments or feel free to send me mail (rckenned at yahoo dot com).
I am an employee of Yahoo! but I don’t speak on it’s behalf. The views of this post are mine and mine alone.
December 20th, 2005 at 2:22 am
This makes perfect sense, but obviously they get more and more difficult for humans to read, so someone’s got to think up something new..maybe random images of famous locations? Although that would be inconvenient to some who don’t know that much. I just think old guys like IanF shouldn’t complain unless they’ve got a solution for it, they can just as easily have an e-mail service that has spam all the time.
December 20th, 2005 at 8:27 am
Brian, sort of. The problem is during compose when you’re hit by a CAPTCHA, we’re not trying to reduce your spam. We’re trying to reduce everybody’s spam. So, whether you want spam or not, we’d probably hit you with a CAPTCHA anyway just to make sure the people who don’t want spam don’t get it.
I think people like IanF SHOULD complain. Without people vocalizing just how bad these processes are (answering CAPTCHAs), people won’t feel the pressure to fix them.
December 20th, 2005 at 9:05 am
How much of spam do you think originates from within the Yahoo Webmail client as opposed to relay servers? I will probably be unenthusiastic about typing the captcha everytime i send out email. is there no other way to authenticate a user as non-bot while signing into yahoo webmail?
December 20th, 2005 at 10:18 am
Ajay, I can’t give any specifics. But I can say that Yahoo! Mail is subjected to some very serious spam attacks through the web interface. That’s the whole reason we have those countermeasures in place. If there were no attacks, we’d happily drop the CAPTCHA.
December 20th, 2005 at 6:46 pm
It’s also worth pointing out that the CAPTCHA isn’t shown on *every* message
(And yes, the spammers attack *everything* — webmail compose, SMTP submit servers, Yahoo! Groups, Message Boards, etc.)
December 21st, 2005 at 3:53 am
well i have never found the captcha to be a difficult thing to do. Though yeh I would certainly get rid of it if I could!!!
What amazes me at Yahoo Mail is that you guys think about everything! like the ability to view a Excel documents in an email even if I do not have MS Excel installed on my computer! I heard so many that were using Y! Mail because it supported very well different type of characters. This Greek teacher was explaining how Y! Mail is the best one to manage greek characters.
I am sure you will find a solution for people not gifted with perfect sight.
Keep up the good work
December 23rd, 2005 at 1:02 pm
I believe that it is good to complain, or at least comment, on things we find annoying (in my case) or prohibitive (in the case of a blind person).
My post listed half-a-dozen reasons why I thought Yahoo Mail could have detected that I was a human sending mail and not a robot. Then it would not have needed to challenge me in the process of sending mail. Note this is very different from the signup case, where I support such challenges 100%.
December 23rd, 2005 at 2:05 pm
IanF, yes…I read your reasons for why we should have detected that you’re a human. I can’t say much other than yes, we hear you. You’re not the only person complaining about the CAPTCHAs. We’re not sitting idly either. We are actively working out some of these issues on our end.
It will improve with time. Some of the excessive CAPTCHA issues you’re seeing are related to this being a beta.
December 24th, 2005 at 12:09 am
Thanks for listening.
BTW - I also noted in my Blog that I reverted to the old (pre-Beta) version of Yahoo mail. This was for two reasons:
1. I was getting many error dialogue boxes popping up. See http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/4607/1882/1600/Yahoo.jpg and the corresponding post from Dec 20th.
2. I send photos to my friends frequently and like the PhotoMail (Beta).
I am guessing that PhotoMail will eventually be integrated with the new Yahoo Mail and you’ll iron out the glitches that led to those annoying errors.
Happy Holidays.
Ian
December 24th, 2005 at 1:02 am
Ian, the error messages are a combination of 3 things:
1) The backend (the piece I work on) still has some issues to be worked out. The errors you’re frequently seeing are actually coming from the backend bits. We are actively working to cut the number of errors from the backend down.
2) The frontend (the piece I don’t work on) isn’t being very user friendly when those errors from the backend occur. Rather than sending you something nice and easy like, “yeah, that didn’t work…try again” it says far more cryptic things because it’s really just telling you the error it got from the backend.
3) Spellcheck isn’t ready for non-IE browsers yet. Hopefully sometime in the not too distant future the frontend guys will finish that up. My wife uses Mozilla and I constantly have her badgering me about when we’ll finish spellcheck for her.
I don’t know what the story is with PhotoMail. Working on the backend, I’m not as involved with user-facing features. But I know it’s a valuable service, so I’m sure they’ve got something planned.
January 11th, 2006 at 9:51 pm
How are things going with the Beta? I have been using the old UI for a few weeks now and I miss the interactivity of the new front end.
BTW - back in ancient history (1980s) I worked on email apps at HP in England. We did not have to deal with half the issues you’re dealing with but some of your challenges are familiar. Good luck.
January 11th, 2006 at 11:00 pm
The beta’s going strong. We keep adding more people to it and it continues to get mostly positive reviews. Obviously we’re taken to task for some things, but that’s to be expected.
January 20th, 2006 at 5:10 am
Hey Ryan,
FYI, I just left this via the beta feedback form, thought I’d bring it to your attention.
>>>
Ok, we’re done. I have discovered I cannot send attachments to anyone @ Comcast.net (my boss, unfortunately) unless the attachment filenames are six characters or less. I don’t know where the problem is, though it’s clearly something to do with BOTH Comcast AND Yahoo’s new client, but, I can’t keep switching back and forth between the beta and the production clients, it’s too much damn hassle. Thanks, I’ll revisit the beta periodically to see if this problem is resolved. -kj-
January 20th, 2006 at 1:34 pm
Can you give me an example filename that isn’t working? What happens if you send that file to someone NOT at Comcast?
February 16th, 2006 at 9:01 am
The CAPTCHA on yahoo mail is infuriating. I am a web developer with fairly keen eyesight. It seems that for every 3rd email I send I get asked to decipher the image. Quite often though the image is not decipherable, is it upper case, is it lower case, is it a 1 an I or an L. Arrrggghhhh. Also if you bugger it up and go back to the email your email text is lost.
Someone help this nightmare end
February 20th, 2006 at 5:08 pm
I am having some problems sending attachments as well. Half the time it arrives at its destination currupted. For example, some .pdf files I sent arrived as .txt, and even after simply changing the file extension, it still couldn’t open. However, from my “Sent” folder, it is in tact. This has happened on several occasions, and now that I”m thinking about it, mostly to users @ohio.edu (Ohio University). I’m puzzled as to why this is, but it is frustrating because I have to turn around and use another email to send attachments. By the way, this has happened with .jpg and .doc as well.
May 11th, 2006 at 12:30 pm
CAPTCHA at yahoo is driving me crazy. Unless they find a less intrusive approach and address my complaints they will soon loose me as a paying customer.–Tom
May 12th, 2006 at 12:28 am
Tom, have you used the feedback form to let us know what problems you’re seeing? Do you not like CAPTCHA in general or do you feel like you’re seeing the CAPTCHA too often?
July 19th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
Yahoo! simply needs to implement an audio playback CAPTCHA now to meet the needs of the blind and visually impaired. Other companies like AOL, Google and Microsoft are already doing this, so there are no excuses. Since the CAPTCHA is designed to differentiate between computers and humans, a failure to provide an accessible alternative represents an afront to the very humanity of blind and visually impaired people. We don’t accept the current state of affairs. The current CAPTCHA without a workable accessible alternative is clear and simple discrimination against the blind!
August 30th, 2006 at 3:11 pm
Agreed - you do waaaaaayyyy to many turing tests. You are killing any form of productivity. Its totally infuriating.
I swear its almost every email.
And yes I complain daily thru the feedback form but I think there is no human on the other side - least they’d fail any turing test.
S
February 18th, 2007 at 8:25 am
Actually I found this blogg because I’m trying to find out why I can’t use nicknames in my emails anymore with autocomplete disabled. It gives me the bad sintax or nickname is not in your address book message. All nicknames I try are in my address book. I was wondering if the Beta was accessible. That question was answered. I’m using Window Eyes 6.0 as my screen reader. Actually the Captcha’s usually only get me if I try forwarding something to someone not in my address book, or if I try sending a naked .exe attachment. If you think Yahoo is bad, try Orkut! You can’t even post a message with hyperlinks anymore without seeing the Captcha. I chop them up with spaces to avoid this. A sighted friend in Brazil just removes all the dots lol. OK, my ideal webmail. It would give me the option of seeing text-only webpages. All those graphics on the page, including adverts, take lots of time to load up. Thank God I don’t have dial-up anymore. I’ve always liked the way I don’t have to open up plain-text attachments to read them, and that I can review Word documents and more right in my web-browser. I also like the virus scan feature for attachments. I’ve had this computer for almost 4 years with only one virus. You mentioned calling Yahoo to help with the Captcha, well I tried that once and never got a call back. Luckily I have someone sighted available to read the occasional Captias, although it usually takes my Mom about 3 tries to get any Captcha right. One more comment totally off-topic, two years ago I was going to try Yahoopops and Eudora to get my Yahoo mail but my then Window Eyes 4.5 wouldn’t read Yahoopops. I don’t want the bother of changing my email address but if Yahoo web mail becomes unusable I’ll probably try for a yahoo.ca or yahoo.br account so I can get free Pop3 access, which brings me to a question. Why??? Why does Yahoo.com not have free pop3 access while Yahoo.anything else has it?
February 18th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Oh I almost forgot. Here is some information about a mailing list you might want to join. It’s for web designers and users of access technology alike.
“About the WebAIM-Forum Discussion List
The Web Accessibility Forum mailing list is for anyone interested in discussing Web
accessibility issues. Individuals from all organizations and specialties are encouraged
to join.”
The link is above.