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From: Tim Harshbarger
Date: Sep 20, 2006 12:50PM


Debbie,

All I can offer is the opinion of someone who uses both a screen reader
and screen magnifier. I tend to use the screen reader the majority of
the time and the screen magnifier only when I have to do so.

This summer I tried using Ticket Master to purchase tickets to attend
some of the plays at our local Shakespeare festival. It was very
frustrating.

I personally don't like the approach that requires me to fill out a form
and wait for someone to contact me or that requires me to call someone
so I can access their site.

Imagine how useful people would think the internet is if they had to
call the site owner or wait for the site owner to call them in order to
gain access to a new site.

SO, by now, you probably guessed correctly that I tried using screen
magnification. Also, by that point, I was becoming very bull-headed.
Between 1.5 and 2 hours later, I managed that was just clear enough to
let me guess the right answer. Probably, not the best use of my
evening. However, by that point, I wanted to find out how accessible the
rest of the application was. That is a hazard of this kind of work.

I believe Christian is right that there is no completely satisfactory
answer. Even if one just focuses on the user (forget the bot issues
that captcha is supposed to solve,) each solution by itself proves to be
inaccessible to some other group of users. So, if you have to use
captcha, you may not find a 100% solution.

Tim