Yahoo! Mail Announced - for the Visually Impaired

The new product that will help visually impaired people to use the Yahoo! Mail service was announced today by the Research and Development department of Yahoo! India.

The whole idea of the Sunnyvale-based company is that the accessibility supporting Yahoo! Mail Classic will be the starting point to help the ones with visual deficiencies use the standard Yahoo! Mail service with similar ease as other users do. The reason for this is that the Yahoo! Mail classic works on all standard screen reader software.

A screen reader is a software application that attempts to identify and interpret what is being displayed on the screen. This interpretation is then represented to the user with text-to-speech, sound icons, or a Braille output. Screen readers are a form of assistive technology (AT) potentially useful to people who are blind, visually impaired, or learning disabled, often in combination with other AT such as screen magnifiers.

Wikipedia informs us that a relatively new development in the field consists in web-based applications like Talklets that use JavaScript to add text-to-speech functionality to web content. The primary audience for such applications includes those who have difficulty reading because of learning disabilities or language barriers. Although functionality remains limited compared to equivalent desktop applications, the major benefit is that of increasing the accessibility of said websites when viewed on public machines where users do not have permission to install custom software, giving people greater 'freedom to roam'.

This is the way the Yahoo! India R&D team chose to go about it and it is most likely they will succeed to do a good job because "the team in Bangalore has yet played a pivotal role to make the new Yahoo! mail accessible to all. Yahoo! has a dedicated team of accessibility experts who ensure that Yahoo! products benefit all users with disabilities, the company said", the Business Standard informs us.