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Number of posts in this thread: 5 (In chronological order)

From: shawn klein
Date: Wed, Jul 11 2007 4:30PM
Subject: OT Yahoo Accessibility on PetitionOnline
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Hi. Don't know what your opinions are on the
effectiveness of PetitionOnline, but a friend of mine
has created a petition to ask Yahoo to add an audio
recording alongside their CAPTCHA pictures to make it
possible for blind people to create a Yahoo account
without sighted assistance, as of now the only option
is to leave your phone number for someone at Yahoo to
call you back, which it's been my experience, they
don't. Even my Mom has trouble reading those things,
and she can see with glasses. So here's the link.
http://www.petitiononline.com/yabvipma/petition.html

From: smithj7
Date: Thu, Jul 12 2007 6:40PM
Subject: Re: OT Yahoo Accessibility on PetitionOnline
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I believe. I will send to the NFB florida list group and send it to our
Staff tommorrow. I have always been upset by the lack as well.

From: smithj7
Date: Thu, Jul 12 2007 7:00PM
Subject: Re: OT Yahoo Accessibility on PetitionOnline
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I wish the petition was more broad and say something to the effect: I
am blind or a person who believes in equal access. (then the rest)

I signed anyway with a pubic comment.

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Fri, Jul 13 2007 1:20AM
Subject: Re: OT Yahoo Accessibility on PetitionOnline
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On Wed, 11 Jul 2007, shawn klein wrote:

> - - a friend of mine
> has created a petition to ask Yahoo to add an audio
> recording alongside their CAPTCHA pictures to make it
> possible for blind people to create a Yahoo account
> without sighted assistance,

I hope the petition has a positive effect. I cannot personally sign it,
because it starts "As a blind user" and I am not blind.

I wonder why the text of the petition says: "The page says that, if you
are visually impaired, you have to leave a phone number, and be contacted."
I cannot see such a statement on Yahoo's page for E-mail signup.

Moreover, asking for "an audio file representing the characters on the
image" really asks for less discrimination, not removal of discrimination.
It would help some people but it would leave many problems unsolved.

The captcha that Yahoo uses also discriminates against the large number of
people who have difficulties in recognizing distorted images of
characters. Unfortunately, captchas are getting more common - I have even
seen a captcha in a private company's complaint form for customers.

I think the message should be "stop discrimination, stop captcha". If one
wants to refer to possible technical solutions, then I think the W3C page
"Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA" might be suitable:
http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/

From: shawn klein
Date: Fri, Jul 13 2007 2:00PM
Subject: Re: OT Yahoo Accessibility on PetitionOnline
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Thanks Jamie and Jukka. Well I wasn't the author of
the petition, a friend in Brazil wrote it, but I
passed on your comments. Unfortunately we can't go
changing it now. We'd just have to start a new one,
and that again wouldn't be fair to the people who've
already signed. I don't see CAPTCHA going any time
soon, so an audio CAPTCHA is better than nothing. I
wish that Google would get on the ball and add their
audio CAPTCHA to Orkut. It should be instated on all
their services.