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Re: OT Yahoo Accessibility on PetitionOnline

for

From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Jul 13, 2007 1:20AM

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/