You may not have heard of Verizon Media but you may recognize some of the properties that they work on including Yahoo! Sports, Yahoo! Fantasy Football and Yahoo! Finance.
J.J. talks to Mike Shebanek, Head of Accessibility at Verizon Media to learn how you can win $1,000,000 and other prizes by filling out an accessible NCAA tournament bracket and about other accessibility initiatives at the company.
CSUN 2019 coverage is Brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology, Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings, access technology book reviews, and mobile apps, and how they can enhance entertainment, education and employment, log on to AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind's free, monthly, online technology magazine. Visit www.afb.org/aw.
Transcript
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Hide transcriptTranscribed By Grecia Ramirez
Direct from Anaheim, it’s blindbargains.com coverage of CSUN 2019, brought to you by AFB AccessWorld.
For the latest news and accessibility information on mainstream and access technology; Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon offerings; access technology book reviews and mobile apps and how they can enhance entertainment, education, and employment, log onto AccessWorld, the American Foundation for the Blind’s free monthly online technology magazine, www.afb.org/aw.
Now, here’s J.J. Meddaugh.
J.J. MEDDAUGH: CSUN 2019. Thrilled to have on Mike Shebanek, Head of Accessibility for Verizon Media. You may know him more with Yahoo. We’ll talk about that in a second.
Mike, welcome to our podcast.
MIKE SHEBANEK: Great to be here, J.J. Thanks.
JM: So let’s start off right there. Verizon Media. Explain exactly what is that.
MS: Yeah. So not a lot of people know that Verizon actually purchased Yahoo and AOL recently. So you’ll still see the same brand names and hear the same brand names like Yahoo Mail, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News and Finance; AOL; HuffPost; Engadget, TechCrunch. These are all brands -- are now part of the Verizon family. So we’re wearing the Verizon logo, but all the same products still live and go forward the same way.
JM: So what does your main role encompass?
MS: Yeah. So I’m head of the Accessibility team, and our team is really focused on making sure everything that we make, every service that we offer is not only accessible, but really usable, something that people love using with assistive technology. So we really want to make sure we’re getting user feedback to make sure things are easy and fun, that are some things that people would recommend, not just, sort of, tick the box that it passes some test.
JM: So a lot of your focus here are on apps, especially sports. You know, there’s always lots of focus on work apps and education apps, but you have a lot going on with March Madness, for instance. Why don’t you talk about that?
MS: I appreciate that. And that’s actually a really interesting point, because we respect and want people to make productivity apps and services accessible. But we always think of ourselves as, sort of, going beyond productivity, because we realize that there’s a lot of people’s lives, even at work, that revolves around social things. It could be news or entertainment, weather, sports, fantasy sports, things like that. So we put a lot of our effort to make sure people have access to those things, which aren’t necessarily mandated to be accessible in some cases.
Like, fantasy sports, there’s no requirement to do that, there’s no law to do that. But we had heard from so many people that this could be a really cool thing to do, and so we have the number-one fantasy sports app five years running, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. And we’ve gone out of our way to make that an accessible experience for people as well. So something kind of unexpected, but really, really cool.
JM: What are some of the things that you have done to make it an accessible experience, and what are some of the challenges you’ve had?
MS: Yeah. So one of the things that we heard loud and clear was not only do I want to be able to play, I want to be able to own the league, to be the commissioner. And that’s something that nobody had really thought about prior to this. So we took that as a really cool challenge and thought, how could we make it so that you could be – if you’re blind, you could actually be the commissioner and do – set up the league, set up the draft, set up the timing, and make that a completely accessible experience? So that’s been going on now for, actually, a little while. And we’ve gotten great feedback on that.
JM: Is there a bit of a challenge trying to manage that across multiple platforms that you are supporting?
MS: Yeah. Of course, Android and IOS for mobile, and web for desktop computers. You know, we get different technology challenges there, but we try to make that as smooth an experience as we possibly can. And some of them, it’s better; some of them’s worse, but we’re committed to trying to make it as good as we can.
JM: How integrated are you with the non-accessibility people at Yahoo, the other people that are developing the fantasy apps? As they’re adding new features, do you consult with them before release, or how does it all work?
MS: Yeah. No. It’s a really close relationship. In fact, here at CSUN, we actually have the lead engineer on fantasy sports in our area here to talk with people and get feedback and learn what’s working and what’s not so we can make a better product.
JM: So March Madness, if people are not familiar, it’s, of course, the tournament – the NCAA tournament. Right as this podcast is going to be released, people can pick games and pick winners: How is the bracket going to work, and how is it going to be accessible?
MS: Oh man. It’s perfect timing, isn’t it?
JM: Yes.
MS: So fantasy sports, out – tipoff coming on the 19. And so it’s the perfect time to download this app. And just to be clear for people who may not know, all of the apps that we make are free. So you can download on Play Store, you can download on the App Store and try them out for yourselves, no cost there.
The brackets are just opening up, so you can actually pick your – what you think are going to be the teams that are going to win each round. And it turns out if you can actually match the real rounds and predict the final winner all the way through with every choice correct, there’s a million dollars waiting for somebody, so it’s worth the time to spend.
JM: You might as well try it. The odds are pretty long, quite --
MS: Well, let’s just say you’ll be well-rewarded if you can figure that one out. But that’s part of the fun of it; right? You can enjoy -- even if you’re not perfect, there’s still a lot of fun to be had in watching your teams make it through rounds. And as we say, sometimes hearts are made, and sometimes hearts are broken. But in any case, it’s fun.
JM: So how do you take a bracket, which is a visual artifact, and turn it into something that is accessible as well?
MS: Yeah. Really, it’s just a manner of giving people a sense of the context. And so you can pick your pairings for your teams, and then you have different rounds. And so you’ll only have to worry about, sort of, the first round. You can build your bracket out round at a time. So there might be, like, 16 or 32 teams in a particular round, you pick your match-ups, and then you can kind of move content to the second round and pick those guys.
JM: Does it work better on certain platforms, or does it work across everything?
MS: I would say desktop and IOS right now, to be honest, are probably the best examples.
JM: Okay. So there’s that for this week.
And then, you mentioned fantasy, lots of ways to play fantasy football. One of the things that impressed me on IOS, at least -- and hopefully, it can come to other platforms soon -- is the live draft.
MS: Oh yeah. I think, maybe for me, one of the most fun things. So live draft means that as you’re getting ready to make your picks of which players you want on your team from across the entire league, you pick any player you want to build your own, sort of, personal custom team. Other players are picking at the same time, so your pick that you’re getting ready to do might actually be gone by the time you get there. And so that’s part of the excitement of staying tuned and keeping track of what’s going on around you. And I think we’ve done a really cool job of announcing what’s happening in the draft so that you can be aware audibly of when those picks are being made and who’s being picked so you can recalculate and readjust and make your best pick for that particular time slot.
And one of the cool features we’ve added is the ability for the commissioners to adjust how much time between each of the picks. And so you can set the league up to be 30 seconds or 60 seconds or two minutes or – you can have that adjustment as the commissioner. Once you set it, of course, it’s got to be equal for everybody so it’s fair game. But that ability to make that adjustment allows for more people to participate and have a lot of fun with it.
JM: So sports isn’t the only thing that you are doing. You’re also showing a lot with finance. So what are you showing here?
MS: Yeah. We’re showing the Yahoo Finance app, number one finance app, which is very cool. And people have told us they just love it. Primarily, people use it to track their favorite stocks. So you can take the default set, or you can pick the stocks that you love and customize the lists so you can find the ones you care about the most. It’s also got built-in news and information, so it’s a great source for some news that’s only available on Yahoo finance. We got our own editors and journalists. Some of it’s other industry news and things, but it’s, like, the best central place to keep track of what’s going on in the market.
And then, one of the other cool things is we are now doing bell to bell coverage. So when the market opens early in the morning on Wall Street and they ring that bell, you’ve got a journalist live providing information on what’s happening that day, all the way to the final bell.
And for people who need it, we actually do live captioning of that as well. So you can listen to the audio track, but if you also want the caption track, that’s available. That’s really unique and unusual, so we’re really, really thrilled to have that.
JM: As far as a lot of these financial data, which can be a lot of charts and graphs and things like that, have you done much to try to make that experience accessible?
MS: Yeah. To be honest, it’s a difficult problem. A lot of people have been working on it for a very long time, and we have prototyped a few things. I’m going to tees everybody a little bit by saying there might be more to share, maybe, perhaps by next CSUN or even sooner than that. But we have been doing some work and doing lots of study about how to make charts and graphs more accessible for people. More to make it usable, than just to make it accessible. And that’s where it gets interesting for us. We don’t want to just sort of say, well, yeah. You can hear the numbers and the letters and you kind of know there’s a bar. We want to make it something where it actually – you want to use that chart. You want to use that graph. It’s getting you that information faster, and you can do something with it. So we’ve set the bar pretty high for ourselves. But we hope people are rewarded when we figure it out and get it right.
JM: Great. What are some of the other apps that you are working on or that have some accessibility features in them?
MS: Hey. One more thing I just wanted to cover -- good question on the finance app – is trades. And so this is something a lot of people don’t expect, but with our app – mobile app – Android, IOS – if you link it to your brokerage account or your bank – and there’s 15 or 20 of them that we work with – all the famous ones – E*TRADE, Fidelity, and such – you can, when you see that stock change, go, hey, wait a minute. I got to make – I got to do a trade right now. And what we have heard from users of this finance app – particularly screen reader users – is it’s actually easier and faster to make that trade in the Yahoo app in the moment than for me to stop and go to my other computer or go log into my other brokerage account and figure out where to make that trade and do the trade. And so I wanted to share that with people because I think it’s something that people don’t expect, but it’s actually very cool.
JM: That is very cool. So you’re saying if you link your brokerage account, you don’t have to go into your brokerage app to make that trade? You can just stay all in one app?
MS: Exactly.
JM: That is very cool.
MS: Yeah. And that’s what we talk about in terms of usability. We want to make it easier and faster and simpler and more convenient, not just accessible. And so that’s, I think, a really cool example of that.
JM: I’m glad you snuck that in. I really –
MS: Yeah. Yeah.
JM: -- appreciate it. Other apps that you wanted to mention or talk about for a second?
MS: Well, man. We have Yahoo Weather, and we have Yahoo News. We just came out with a product called Yahoo Play. Gosh. There’s so many – it’s hard to name them all.
JM: We don’t have time for all of them in this podcast.
MS: Yeah.
JM: What is Yahoo Play?
MS: It’s a – kind of a game. And so you sort of -- it gives you, like, questions about pop culture and who’s famous or what’s been said recently or some situation, and you can earn points. And the points are then redeemable for real-world things, which is kind of cool.
JM: It’s accessible?
MS: Yup. It’s – I’ll say it’s mostly accessible. It’s brand new. And so we’ve done some good work on that, but I think we would love to hear back from people how they find it, because ultimately, it’s up to them. They tell us what they think is accessible.
JM: So how do you prioritize, speaking of hearing from people – do you prioritize new features with the resources that you have? You know, you have some apps that are very accessible, some that are still work in progress. How could you be most efficient with making sure you get as much accessibility to as many apps as possible?
MS: Well, we work really hard with all the product teams, and we try and get in early when they're thinking about concepts for products. And then those teams will come back to us as they’re developing the first versions of that. We do some testing internally with our experts on our products – our accessible team. But then, we try and quickly move to user studies. So once we have it working, we’ll go back and we’ll actually invite users to different places that we have our offices and get them to use it and tell us, not does it work, but like, how well does it work? Do they like it? Is it fun? Would I recommend it? And so we have a process that goes on around that.
And then once it ships, we don’t stop. We continue to bring in users and ask them. And we listen at conferences like CSUN here, we get Emails, we get things through our customer care services systems. So we’re really scanning all kinds of different places to get feedback from people to find out what do they care about most? What’s the thing that they want to have next?
And honestly, fantasy sports popped up. When we talked to people about what would be a cool thing that they can’t really find anywhere else, they were like, you know, fantasy. Getting stats on my players. Like, it’s really hard to get an app that I can actually scan all those stats, those tables and charts and things. And so that was, sort of, a result of that as well. That was kind of a cool response from that.
JM: So there’s the perfect segue to getting feedback from users. What is the preferred channel – how can people most efficiently reach accessibility people and provide feedback – specific feedback – about apps and, especially, accessibility services?
MS: Yeah. There’s a couple ways. If you go to verizon.com/accessibility, you can provide feedback that way. We’ve got some contact information there. You can go to verizonmedia.com if you want to talk specifically about apps. And you can send Email, if you want to, to Verizon – accessibility@verizonmedia.com.
JM: And those will get filtered down to the appropriate people, I would assume?
MS: Yeah. Actually, it’s really interesting. It goes to specially-trained agents. We have several centers where we have quite a number of agents that are specially trained in accessibility, and they can use to respond quickly. But if something is really unusual and we can’t get that response, it actually builds up to our accessibility team so we can follow with them or with the customer to make sure they get that answer.
JM: So that also acts as a first line of support. If people just want accessibility help using a Verizon Media product, you can Email that same address?
MS: Yeah. So if it’s accessibility specific question or about assistive technology, that’s a great place to send that feedback or that question. If it’s just a general question about – I need to, like, recover my password because I’m having trouble getting into my account, you can use the standard, traditional process and get answers that way as well.
JM: Great. And of course, if people want to download any of the apps you’ve mentioned, just go to Google Play or the iTunes App Store and –
MS: That’s right.
JM: -- you can get all the apps.
MS: Yeah.
JM: Thank you so much, mike. It’s been a pleasure. I really appreciate it.
MS: I’ve really enjoyed it. Thanks, J.J.
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J.J. Meddaugh is an experienced technology writer and computer enthusiast. He is a graduate of Western Michigan University with a major in telecommunications management and a minor in business. When not writing for Blind Bargains, he enjoys travel, playing the keyboard, and meeting new people.
