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If you do not have some sort of disability like impaired sight or hearing the idea of web accessibility is something that you likely don’t consider. I didn’t. I don’t think that makes any of us bad people but considering the time of year it may give us some pause to count our blessings. Apparently, the one group that needs to be thinking about the issue more than most are web designers and developers. If the article from cnet is any indication it appears that that these folks are thinking about more on the front-end rather than being reminded and having to retro-fit sites later. The cnet article draws attention to Yahoo’s efforts in this arena in particular . Yahoo’s Victor Tsaran knows how much time Web designers spend agonizing over color and font-width choices when laying out an application. So when he started Yahoo’s accessibility push two years ago, he had a tough time arousing sympathy for engineers grousing about how much extra time was needed to create accessibility features. Fortunately for Tsaran, Yahoo’s accessibility manager, he’s running into that problem less and less. Web designers are starting to take accessibility as seriously as button placement or heading layout when they develop their products, improving the Web experience not only for people like Tsaran–who lost his sight at the age of five–but for Web users in general. While not quite yet ubiquitous the idea of web accessibility is important and will continue to be so moving forward. More large companies are acting on their increased awareness according to the folks at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). YouTube has added captioning to its capabilities in response to the need. Honestly, until I read this article I was not aware how great that need actually is. There are about 60 million people in the U.S. who can’t use a computer to get on the Internet in the normal fashion, said Yahoo’s Alan Brightman, senior policy director of special communities. For those people, a mix of screen reader software, keyboards with special buttons, and even motion-sensing Web cameras must take the place of the mouse and QWERTY keyboard. That can cause problems for Web designers who rely too heavily on mouse navigation, or who design pages with special multimedia whiz-bang effects that look cool only to the people that can see them. “There can be an assumption of homogeneity on the Web,” said Naomi Bilodeau, technical program manager for Google. Users of screen readers–software that essentially reads out loud a description of text, links, and buttons on a page–are confounded the most by Captchas and Flash Web pages, according to a recent survey of screen-reader users conducted by WebAIM. 60 million people? That is 1 in 5 Americans cannot experience the web without the assistance of some form of accessibility enhancement. I had no idea. The chart below gives a general idea about how people see the progress being made. So as the web roars forward with HTML5 standards being debated and more and more advances there is a reason beside just fairness that should make businesses stand up and take notice of web accessibility concerns: money. It is estimated that there is $220 billion in discretionary spending available to disabled people. So where are you with accessibility issues for your site? Have you given them consideration? Now many may find this next question as a way to rile up some folks. If that’s the case then so be it. Consider this: In the current day and age of more and more aggressive government regulation would you be prepared both operationally and financially to make the changes to your website that could be a mandate? It’s already a requirement to do work with the government. And in order to do business with the U.S. government, companies must comply with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which insists that electronic and information technology products sold to government agencies be designed with disabled employees in mind, and that government services produced by contractors consider disabled citizens in equal measure. Are you ready?

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Web Accessibility Moving More Toward the Norm

Yahoo (moves toward the little blue bird, the center of attention at the party): Well, hello there, baby. You sure are popular here. Twitter (BIG SMILE): Yep! And I have #friends @overthere and @overthere and— Yahoo (slips an arm around the bird): How would you like to come back to my place for a little . . . integration? Twitter: Whoa, buddy—this is why I carry an API at all times! Back in July, Twitter was popping up everywhere: first a deal with Bing , then a deal with Google . Not to be left out, Yahoo made a real-time foray with OneRiot , but apparently they still had their eyes on the life of the party: Twitter. Last month, Yahoo News integrated Twitter into its results for breaking news via a tabbed shortcut: Apparently this went well, because now more of these Tweet results will be directly integrated into the SERPs—and they just might be doing this right: However, Yahoo won’t be adding Twitter to all its results. According to the Yahoo Search blog, So how does this work? We continuously keep track of queries searched on Yahoo!, and when there is a spike in interest in a topic, our search algorithm selects relevant tweets to show on the search results page, either as a part of the Yahoo! News shortcut or in a Twitter section, like in the examples above. The age of the tweets will vary – some will be a minute old, while others may be hours old. Our goal is to feature interesting Twitter content that is relevant to your query and complements the other results you find on the search page. And if they do that, that might be just the way to integrate Twitter into SERPs: filtered for relevance, used only for topics generating a lot of discussion, and sequestered in a section of the SERP. What do you think? Is this too little, too late for Yahoo? Or is this more than you want to see of Twitter in your SERPs?

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Yahoo Moving in on Twitter

It’s been a long time doming, but now it’s officially, truly, official: AOL is part of Time Warner no more. (Technically, actually, AOL bought Time Warner—isn’t that weird?—and now they’re the ones being spun off.) And with its newly-single status, AOL is eyeing every woman in the room—especially old flame Yahoo. They were flirting (or at least rumors have been flying) heavily last year , with reports resurfacing periodically . But now the love has turned to rivalry, with AOL and Yahoo both focusing on their Internet display advertising businesses . AOL is also looking to take on other Internet behemoths like Citysearch, Yelp and Google in a local effort : The initiative — which he characterized as “digitizing towns” — will grow to 100 municipalities in 2010, [AOL CEO and ex-Googler Tim] Armstrong said. Providing a turn-key platform where schools, government departments, local businesses, and classified listings firms can create or update Web sites will be at the heart of the effort. AOL is also focusing on an API-intensive ad platform to allow users to interface directly with their data. That’s cool. But the heart of their plan is their content. AOL will be heavily focusing its advertising sales upon its own properties, where 80% of the content is original. Yahoo, by contrast, has about 20% original content. What do you think? Can AOL be turned around, or is it too late?

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AOL vs Yahoo–Again

Yahoo’s taking ad targeting to a whole new level with its new Ad Interest Manager . Now advertisers aren’t the only ones who can target you—you can target yourself, too! The new AIM system enables users to select their interests and block ads outside of those interest areas. According to the press release , the tool: Provides a central point where Yahoo! visitors can assert even greater control over their online experience. Gives visitors an unparalleled view into the information used to deliver interest-based advertising. Shows the visitor both Yahoo!’s educated guesses about their interests and a summary of observations, along with other information they have provided. Provides a list of specific interest categories that Yahoo! has placed a user into and lets people turn those categories off. Allows people who don’t want to see interest-based ads to turn them off entirely. As the quote indicates, the system gives you a list of ad categories Yahoo believes you’re interested in, based on your activity on the site, including search history, and properties including Yahoo Answers, Flickr and Yahoo Groups. You can then switch off each individual category. Switch off seven categories, and the system prompts you, asking if you want to switch off all behavioral targeting. Overall, this is a smart move—allowing users to target ads to themselves insures greater value for advertisers. But the system will only work as well as its implementation—both the targeting and the promotion of the system must be good enough for the system to gain widespread use. Yahoo will have to use fairly prominent, probably front-page, promotion to not only show that are they behind this system, but to make their every day users aware of the improvements. What do you think? Will you use the AIM targeting system? As a user or an advertiser, are you excited about this?

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Yahoo Lets Users Customize Ads

Friday brought Microsoft and Yahoo one step closer to the search deal they announced in July . The terms of the deal received final approval from two very important groups— Microsoft and Yahoo . Although the two were supposed to have the details hammered out by late October, they took a few extra weeks to refine their agreement. This agreement still needs regulatory approval, and such agencies as the US Department of Justice are on the record as saying they will scrutinize the deal closely . Meanwhile, the deal isn’t projected to warrant much concern from the European Commission —but the DOJ is probably the bigger concern. Not only are both companies headquartered in the US, but also scrutiny from the Department of Justice—and threats of anti-trust action—ultimately killed a search ad deal between Yahoo and Google last year—will the Bingahoo deal suffer the same fate? Should the DOJ treat Microsoft and Yahoo differently since they’re not the dominant search engine, or would that be unfair? Is the Yahoo-Microsoft deal the lesser of two evils, and the only chance to unseat Google in the near future? Or does the deal merit more scrutiny from the DoJ? Pilgrim’s Partners: SponsoredReviews.com – Bloggers earn cash, Advertisers build buzz!

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Microsoft and Yahoo Seal the Deal

At the rate Yahoo is dumping its own technology and partnering with others, the only thing left that will be “Yahoo built” will be these bloody big pens: A little over a year since Yahoo announced the expansion of Yahoo Profiles, the search engine, portal, social network , we-don’t-know-what-we-are company is apparently ready to ditch its own social network aspirations and jump into bed with Facebook : It will enable them to connect with Facebook friends on Yahoo!, view a feed of their friends’ related activity on Yahoo!, and share content—such as photos from Flickr or comments on news stories—with all of their friends on Facebook. The content that consumers share with Facebook friends will then create a loop that drives visitors back to Yahoo!. OK, so you can’t blame Yahoo for making this move. After all, social networking is Facebook’s strength, and not Yahoo’s. But, I’m starting to worry what Yahoo has left to call it’s “strength.” When your business is supported by the strength of other companies, it becomes very easy for your foundation to be undermined by them.

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Yahoo Partners with Facebook, Plans to Focus on Selling Big Pens?

In a word: branding. As a brand, both through their own efforts and through sheer luck, Google has been able to position itself as the #1 online brand in the US according to Forrester Research . Others among the top ten, including Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, have generated some of the same emotional responses from their fans. The top ten brands (note that respondents selected two from a list): Since 2007, MySpace suffered a precipitous fall in brand favoritism. Yahoo and eBay also suffered. Amazon saw sufficient growth to move from distant third to nearly tied for second; Google grew significantly in its #1 spot. Facebook and YouTube (and what the crap, Sony?) joined the list. Interestingly, both Microsoft and Apple saw small growth over that time. So what qualities made these online brands stand out in respondents’ minds? Forrester points out that we might expect attributes like prestige, popularity, speed and “the social.” And we’d be wrong. Interestingly, some of the same characteristics that associate well with offline brands: trustworthiness, helpfulness and relevance to the consumer were the top-named attributes of these brands. (In case you’re wondering, Amazon was voted most trustworthy, Google most helpful and Yahoo, Amazon, Facebook, eBay and Microsoft most relevant.) There is one point that the report makes that I don’t know if I buy: Yahoo! gets it right with “Y!ou” re-positioning. Yahoo!’s brand revitalization strategy is right on target, taking rivals on directly and clarifying its fuzzy image. Its core focus is on “relevance,” a top-tier attribute that currently doesn’t have a clear online leader. Yahoo! rivals Facebook and Microsoft show some traction here, but relevance is a relative weakness for Google. Yahoo!’s new $100-million advertising effort also highlights “fun,” another critical attribute where Google comes up short. To drive its global revitalization, Yahoo!’s new CMO brought in Landor Associates and Goodby, Silverstein & Partners to work with its main agency, Ogilvy & Mather. It launched its campaign with big TV and outdoor buys to “root the brand position.” It is following this with multichannel messaging — including explainers on its own site — around product proof points. I agree that Yahoo’s image had grown fuzzy and that taking on its rivals directly would be helpful, but are we thinking about the same campaign? Has there been more to the campaign than that one cringe-worthy commercial? (Because seriously, I wince every time I come across it on a Yahoo property.) It didn’t say “fun” to me (well, I guess it did, just not that “fun” had anything to do with online) and it definitely didn’t clarify their brand image. (How is emphasizing that “we’re as diverse as every single human on the earth—I mean, we’re just like you!” clarifying anything?) I guess we’ll have to see the “explainers” and “product proof points” to see if the rest of the campaign is effective. But so far, I’m not buying it—especially not when Yahoo’s brand has taken a hit in not only this survey, but others that correlate directly with the campaign timeline . What do you think? How have these brands acquired these attributes? Is Yahoo repositioning itself to take on more favorable attributes?

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Why People Love Google