Too much scrolling, keyboard shortcuts, confusing format
Accessibility has become a nightmare in Neo, because it apparently didn't occur to anyone that having to move the mouse around a window more, will contribute to more problems with carpal tunnel and other repetitive stress injuries. There is entirely too much scrolling in Yahoo products now.
In Yahoo Mail everything requires double scrolling - once in the browser, and another in the Yahoo Mail window. One scroll bar only should be necessary: the one in the browser!
A related issue is when a message in the Yahoo Groups archives is wider than the message window, it is impossible to read because the sideways scroll bar is on the bottom and out of reach when I'm at the top of the message. This was a problem in Yahoo Mail that was finally fixed.
Also related to having to move the mouse more than necessary, is that a lot of my Yahoo Groups differ in who the default recipient is. Many are to the whole group, some are to the individual, and some change back and forth. When replying from the online message archives, I used to be able to immediately see who I'm replying to, but now I have to expand the header to see it. I've repeatedly found myself replying to the wrong recipient. And of course when I try to go back to my message and correct the error, there is no way to retrieve the message.
In the old Yahoo Groups system composed messages were retrievable by hitting the back button on my browser. Now when I write a message and send it, or accidentally hit the Reply instead of Send button (which is due to the terrible design of Neo!), I cannot go back to it. I've spent considerable time writing posts that simply disappeared because I either accidentally sent it to just one individual in the group, or hit a wrong button. There is no way to keep a record of my own sent (or attempted) messages anymore.
The entire Neo design isn't user-friendly, especially for people with disabilities (the largest minority in the world!). When people reply to posts they are frequently out of context now, because the message they're replying to is hidden, and must first be expanded in the archives (still more moving of the mouse). Depending on which reply link they hit in their digests, they may not even have the option to include the message they're replying to. This is causing a lot of confusion in several of my groups. A lot of people with neurological disabilities are having a hard time navigating and using Yahoo Groups effectively now.
If people want to eliminate the message they're replying to, or shorten it, they can choose to do that themselves. Please stop making those decisions for people. Defaults should be set with the novice in mind, not for those who know all the ins and outs of Yahoo's constantly changing system. Give us back the context of our conversations, PLEASE!
Another confusing bug in Yahoo Mail is that when composing a message in Yahoo Mail, and I delete in the middle of a sentence or paragraph, the cursor frequently jumps to the end of the paragraph and deletes whatever is there. This appears to be happening when the cursor hits the end of the word in front of whatever I'm trying to delete, and meets the text behind the cursor. No matter what I do, I cannot simply backspace to continue deleting. I have to highlight it and then delete it, again requiring more mouse moves.
Another related issue is that it is impossible to move text around in Yahoo Mail by highlighting and dropping it. I have to highlight it, cut it, then paste it, requiring several more steps than should be necessary.
These last two issues work normally in Yahoo Groups, but not in Yahoo Mail. It appears that developers who work on Groups and Mail are completely separate departments that don't communicate with each other.
I frequently make mistakes when I type, or brush over my touchpad which kicks me out of the Yahoo Mail compose window. Often when I continue to type a couple more letters before I realize I brushed over the touchpad, I appear to be triggering a keyboard shortcut that opens up Yahoo Messenger showing me 'available' to all my contacts.
I don't want my contacts to think that I'm available through Yahoo Messenger. I do not use Yahoo Messenger. I will never use Yahoo Messenger. I don't want Yahoo Messenger. If I had the option, I would get rid of it altogether!
It is really obnoxious that Yahoo makes it impossible for me to turn off this feature. There are many of us who have disabilities that make it hard for us to type with perfect precision. We should not have to hassle with having to keep turning off an unwanted feature, because our disabilities trigger some equally unwanted keyboard shortcut.
Yahoo should have been sitting down with the disability community to discuss how changes would affect different people with disabilities. It's outrageous that Yahoo Mail and Groups, which were functional and easy to navigate a few years ago, have now become a nightmare of epic proportions for many of us who rely on these services for support and survival.
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D commented
Didn't have enough pictures of Swedish house-cat necrophilia.
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MidiMagic commented
Translation for the techies at Yahoo: Stop using frames.
Frames are now deprecated by the World Wide Web Consortium (the group that sets Internet standards). As such, web browsers now just tolerate frames, but they do not display them optimally. Scrollbars often do not appear in the correct places, or do not appear at all.
Stop using frames. They are dead.