Yandex for the blind and visually impaired

Four months ago, a petition was created on change.org calling for the leadership of Yandex - the author of the petition asks to pay attention to the accessibility of the interfaces of Yandex services for blind and visually impaired users. It is alleged that until 2014, Yandex services were well optimized for blind users and compatible with screen access programs. Subsequently, the situation began to deteriorate:

Difficulties for each blind and visually impaired user begin when creating an account, but I will describe here only the two most important and critical ones:

1. A blind person cannot protect their account. When creating a box on the passport.yandex.ru website, there is an opportunity to ask a secret password recovery question, but at present the list with the option to select the question is not voiced by the screen access program, which means you cannot choose anything and you can not recover the lost password or protect yourself from potential intruders can.

2. Yandex refuses to provide support to the blind and visually impaired: feedback forms, also called “Write to support,” have a list of topics to be asked to choose one. As you might have guessed, you cannot select anything from this list using the keyboard, which means you cannot send a message.

In 2016, Denis Kuznetsov, manager of the development of search interfaces at Yandex, spoke in an interview with vc.ru about how the company develops interfaces for people with disabilities:

The process of adapting the service for blind and visually impaired users differs little from the standard development cycle.
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• With the help of our testers, we conduct a primary audit of the service and identify the most problematic areas.
• Developers make interface improvements.
• We re-test, look at the modified interface, check the degree of change, identify new problems.
• Repeat steps 2-3 until all accessibility problems are resolved (depending on the complexity of the work).
• We roll out all the changes and talk about the availability of the next Yandex service.

However, in the same interview, the manager of the development of search interfaces noted that:

It is important to add here that “Yandex” products can be released without the status available. However, if accessibility is officially announced, this means that accessibility has been checked more than once and this was preceded by a serious amount of work according to the described scheme. We responsibly treat the assignment of a product of such status.

Now in Yandex, people with disabilities have access to the main page in the domains .ru, .ua, .kz, .by, Mail (its light version) and Yandex Browser. Work on the adaptation of many services is underway, some of them support basic accessibility.

As for the "Search" - now it is also quite accessible, however, it remains for us to solve one small problem related to the semantic frame of the page. Therefore, it is impossible to call the fully accessible “Search” now, but you can use it with the help of screen access programs without serious problems now.

The petition has now been signed by more than 67 thousand people, however, according to its author, there was no reaction:

A lot of time has passed since the last update about the petition, in which I asked you to write to Yandex.nedeg support service.

But so far from the company there was not a single answer, not the slightest reaction.

It should be noted that this is not the first petition of this kind - 10 months ago a petition was created on the same change.org with a request to adapt Yandex navigation for blind and visually impaired users. It is noteworthy that at that time the representatives of Yandex responded - on 12 October 2018, the author of the petition wrote:

Not so long ago, Yandex officially responded to the petition and urged everyone to cooperate on the availability of their navigation applications.
The first beta version of the Yandex.Metro application for Ios has already been released, in the near future they promise to submit a beta version for Android devices.

Next week there will be meetings and talks with blind people on the topic of mapping applications and the availability of Yandex.kart in particular.

In general, the work is in full swing and Yandex representatives are always in touch with us.

However, on February 7, the author of the petition complained:

It seems to me that Yandex has gone into hibernation, in the New Year's anabiosis, so to speak)

If at first, immediately after Yuri Podorozhniy’s answer, they talked to me, reported on all development steps, were encouraging and wrote something at all, but now that the beta version of Yandex.Metro has been released and accessibility errors have been partially fixed in some parts of Yandex.Map , the company has disappeared somewhere.

Nobody asks anything (they used to wonder how best to do it, asked questions and held meetings), no one publishes anything. In general, the silence on the air.

Then it went better and the petition can be considered satisfied - Yandex.Metro became available for the blind and visually impaired, as well as Yandex.Maps (in the long run, at least).

How many people with visual impairment?

Visual impairment is a loose concept. There are blind people (completely or partially), there are visually impaired, suffering from color blindness and other visual impairments. WHO estimates that around 10% of the world’s population suffers from some kind of visual impairment.

According to UN estimates, in the world 0.55% are completely blind and 3.5% are visually impaired. The share of the blind in the United States is 0.43%, and the visually impaired is 1.13%. For Russia, there is no exact statistics, but, according to some data, 218 thousand registered blind and visually impaired, of which 103 thousand are completely blind. If we assume that these figures are underestimated (due to the fact that not all patients are taken into account) and apply statistics for the United States, then there may be more than a million totally blind residents in Russia.

What about the availability of software for the blind and visually impaired?

Definitely bad, even despite the fact that various programs to help the visually impaired and blind appeared in the 90s. A synthesizer for reading information from video memory (and attempts to use Morse code for dubbing due to limited resources and speech synthesis costs), a braille board (which is the only tool for the blind and deaf) and others.

When the problem of accessibility of websites for people with disabilities became more or less noticeable, special versions of the sites came into vogue. Most often, the versions had an enlarged font (or the ability to adjust its size), a contrasting theme (or the ability to choose from several), and the ability to sound the text written on the page. Support for two versions had a number of inconveniences, most of which - the high cost. To get rid of the need to make a special version of the site, the developers began to introduce the so-called. accessibility to the main version of the site.

It is difficult to say how optimized websites and software are today for use by people with disabilities, however, if there are problems even with such giants as Yandex, it is obvious that the situation is far from ideal.

How to optimize websites for people with disabilities?

The basic tutorial for optimizing a site is WCAG 2.0 , a set of W3C recommendations that describes common practices whose goal is to simplify the interaction of users with disabilities with web resources. There is a domestic analogue - GOST R 52872-2012 .

The recommendations are, in general, very simple and easy to implement in practice:

• Non-text content should have a text version (the same alt'y for images, alternative forms of captcha, etc.)
• Media content should contain alternative ways of transmitting information (video captioning, etc.)
• The correct structure of the information (headings, subheadings, etc.), the ability to change the size of the text
• Ability to navigate and control using only one keyboard
• The ability to skip blocks (containing the same information on all pages, such as a cap or footer)

In addition, we can say that optimizing a website for people with disabilities is more like the “make the correct layout, and not as usual” procedure:

• Tables can be a big problem for people with visual impairments if they do not have header and footer tags (thead / tfoot). Many site developers prefer caps and footers either not to do at all, or to visually separate them with background or color, instead of using native tags.
• Flashes, frames and tables used for the layout of the page elements - an unequivocal evil, including for people with disabilities.
• Strict requirements for the user's device (for example, the presence of a mouse / cursor is mandatory or Javascript is enabled to follow links, etc.)
• No indication of page and language encodings
• Insufficient or excessive contrast of colors of text, background and other elements.
• Text size in pixels, not rem or percentage

How and why test sites for people with disabilities?

It is best to test the site with the help of potential users - people with disabilities. If there is no such possibility, then you can use the tools that they use — screen loops, crynriders and other specialized software — without any problems.

Why waste time on it? If not out of a desire to make the world better, then at least due to the fact that any person can become a person with disabilities as a result of an accident, accident or illness. No one is immune from this and it will be extremely unpleasant to be in the camp of those whose convenience is commonplace no one thinks about.