Hello everyone.
I've been following this thread regarding visual varification with great
interest. I believe strongly that something needs to be done about sites
that give us perfectly capable blind users no alternative for visual
varification.
I can understand fully why VV is being used, and obviously it's very
effective against automated spammers signing up for things, otherwise it
wouldn't still be in such wide spread use.
However this does not mean that just because we are blind that we should be
totally excluded from services that opt to use visual verification!
Now I do have gmail and also use another site that required the use of VV to
sign up, and I got around that road block by using the remote assistance
feature of windows messenger to allow a sighted friend of mine to look at my
screen and read me the characters I needed to enter and everything was
smooth sailing from then on.
clearly though this still requires the assistance of a sighted person, and
this to me is unacceptible! I certainly
do not need help to compose this message now do I? So I shouldn't need help
finding out a group of characters that I myself can type in!
I'm not saying stop the use of VV, since after all for a sighted person, VV
is no big deal, they can make use of VV just as easily as I can compose this
email, but give us blind folks who are perfectly capable of using our
computers, some alternate way of getting the needed information! We
currently have no way to magically slice through the image and pull out the
characters needed, nor is it possible to do this. Not all of us have sighted
help at the ready so claiming that oh we have sighted folks that'll help us
is not a valid excuse!
Even if an email was sent to an address provided with the text we needed or
an email containing an attachment with audio of the information we needed
was sent, that'd be fine by me, since a human would have to check the given
email. The point here is these sites that offer no alternate ways for blind
users to get the required information need to somehow be shown what it's
like to not have an alternate way to get the information.
Maybe blind folding some of the key people and giving them no help
whatsoever and telling them to try and sign up for an account with there
service would knock some sense in to them!
HMM maybe I should turn this rant in to a podcast, hmm maybe I just will.
Monty KD6CAE