Yale attended Mount Holyoke Female Seminary (later Mount Holyoke College; 1866–68). She taught briefly in schools in Brandon and Williston, Vermont, and in 1870 joined the staff of the Clarke Institution for Deaf Mutes (from 1896 the Clarke School for the Deaf) in Northampton, Massachusetts. In 1873 she became associate principal, and in 1886 she succeeded the ailing Harriet B. Rogers (Rogers, Harriet Burbank) as principal.

At the Clarke School, Yale and a fellow teacher developed a more detailed and accurate system of phonetic symbols to replace those in Alexander Melville Bell's Visible Speech (1867). The resulting “Northampton Vowel and Consonant Charts,” explained in the pamphlet Formation and Development of Elementary English Sounds (1892), became the most widely used system in America. In 1889 Yale also established a teacher-training department at Clarke and introduced pioneering classes in manual skills and programs of athletics for deaf children. In 1890 she helped establish the American Association to Promote the Teaching of Speech to the Deaf, and she served as its director for many years. She retired as principal of the Clarke School in 1922 but continued to direct the teacher-training program until her death. In 1931 she published an autobiography, Years of Building: Memories of a Pioneer in a Special Field of Education.