Yahoo Week Begins at All About Access; Yahoo Search and Yahoo Shortcuts
I have decided to start Yahoo Week here at All About Access. At least I’m calling it “Yahoo Week” for now. It may wind up becoming “Yahoo Fortnight.” Then again, it might wind up being more like “Guess When Joanie Writes About Yahoo Again Month”—but that’s not the plan.
So why Yahoo Week/Month/Whatever? Well, a number of reasons, really. What initially got me thinking about doing such a thing was the issue of Google’s purely visual captchas. Yes, I’m bringing that up again. But fear not: I’m not dwelling on it during Y W/M/W. Suffice it to say that I want to support those companies that make an effort to provide accessible products and services. Then I thought about how much useful information I get from Yahoo each and every day: news, weather, financial information (stocks before the tech sector bottomed out; lottery results now), driving directions, telephone listings, movie reviews and show times, TV listings, messages from the groups I’m subscribed to, etc., etc., etc. And since All About Access is, after all, about accessing information, I figured I’d share these resources with you. As the title of this entry suggests, the Yahoo features du jour are Yahoo Search and Yahoo Shortcuts.
Yahoo Search
If you already search for things at Google, you’ll find search.yahoo.com to be a familiar environment. There you can search the web, or narrow down your search by following one of the search-type links (images, video, directory, local, news, or products). The biggest difference between searching Google and Yahoo from an access point of view is how the results pages are formatted. If you use Google, then you know that it can sometimes be rather tedious to work your way through the results non-visually. Not so on Yahoo. There, the search results are arranged in two lists: A list of “Sponsor Results” and a list of the “Search Results.” So all you have to do is use your screen reader’s command to navigate among lists. I use JAWS 6.1, so two presses of “l” and I’m there. Once in the list, use your screen reader’s command to jump from list item to list item (“i” in the case of JAWS). This page structure certainly speeds up the process of finding what you want!
Yahoo Shortcuts
Something else I’ve been using recently is Yahoo’s Shortcuts, specialized searches that get you to the information that you want more quickly. For instance, one of the podcasts I’ve been listening to lately is the Richard Vobes Radio Show. Pretty funny stuff I think, but anyway…. He was talking about doing a podcast from a flying lesson in a vintage airplane and mentioned that it would cost 160 pounds in case his listeners wanted to chip in. Well, how much is 160 pounds in terms of U.S. dollars? I could do a search for currency converters and then try to figure out which of the resulting pages actually contained an accessible currency converter that would convert pounds to dollars. Or I could use a Yahoo Shortcut. I typed the following into the search edit box at search.yahoo.com: “convert 160 pounds to dollars”. The results from Shortcut searches appear after sponsored results and before the other results. I pressed “l” once and found myself in a list of 20 items. Since the sponsored results list is always short, I concluded that there weren’t any sponsored results this time and up arrowed to find “160.00 British Pounds = 305.22 U.S. Dollars.” Apparently the dollar isn’t doing so hot these days, but that’s another topic for another blog.
As long as I am converting stuff, I would like to find out how much water I’m drinking. You’re supposed to drink, what, 8 cups a day? I know that there are 8 ounces in a cup, which means I should be drinking 64 ounces. I also know that the bottle I’m sipping from right now contains 710 mL which, being a stereotypical American, means that I have no idea how much water I’m drinking. I asked Yahoo: “convert 710 mL to ounces” This didn’t tell me the answer, so I modified my search to an open-ended request: “convert 710 mL” This time Yahoo answered “710 Milliliters = 24.015 Fluid ounces (US)” Beneath this answer were links for various other units. When I followed the link for drops, I was told that “710 Milliliters = 10,947.633 Drops.” It turns out that 710 mL is also 2,304.764 Dashes and 1,152.382 Pinches. How do you pinch water??? But getting back to how much water I need to drink each day…. I know I’m supposed to drink 64 ounces, and that this bottle contains 24.015 ounces. Math was never my friend, so I asked Yahoo: “64/24.015”. Yahoo responded: “64/24.015 = 2.66500104102”.
And this is just the tip of the Yahoo Shortcut iceberg. Thanks to Yahoo shortcuts, I know it’s currently 57° and partly cloudy in my neck of the woods, and that going outside won’t cause me to miss my UPS delivery which is coming on Wednesday. Apparently the Red Sox beat the Rangers 6-5 today, and 9-2 yesterday, but lost 2-7 the day before. And the person from the 413 area code who wants me to call her back lives in western Massachusetts, so I don’t have to worry about calling too early in the morning. We still haven’t left the tip of the iceberg. By the way, here’s the definition of “iceberg,” courtesy of Yahoo Shortcuts:
iceberg: NOUN: 1. A massive floating body of ice broken away from a glacier. Only about 10 percent of its mass is above the surface of the water.
Alright, so you already knew that. Use the shortcut “define” to look up some other word then.
So how do you find out about the rest of the shortcuts? If you go to http://tools.search.yahoo.com/shortcuts, you can read all about them and give them a try. I’ve also copied and pasted the shortcuts that are currently available here for your convenience. I want to stress “currently” because Yahoo is apparently soliciting suggestions for additional shortcuts on their Yahoo Shortcuts Feedback page. I know I will keep checking Yahoo’s About Shortcuts page, and encourage you to do the same.
Happy Searching!
—jd
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