Re: What's Webvisim? (was Re: Participating in forums)

  • From: Yardbird <yardbird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Fri, 17 Oct 2008 10:45:48 -0700

Hi Gerald,

Thanks for responding with such a generous explanation. I'm well aware of 
the problems of CAPTCHA blockades for the several years since they were 
introduced. And I've also encountered an increasing number of streaming 
audio alternative CAPTCHA setups, intended to help the screen reader user or 
just the low vision person. Sometimes an audio CAPTCHA works well enough for 
me, but not only is the sound sometimes so masked by white noise and so 
distorted that I have to play the audio a number of times to make a 
reasonable guess at the characters, but lately I've encountered a lot of 
them where the audio link simply doesn't work, yielding a variety of Windows 
error sounds when clicked on and sometimes also an error message from the 
site, usually advising me to make sure I have a sound card and speakers. 
Like, how do they imagine I can "read" such advice if I don't have a sound 
card and speakers?

I have yet to figure out or hear from anyone what is behind these 
dysfunctional audio events, and I can't even guess. Because when it all 
works well, clicking on the link launches my Real Player or Windows Media 
player, and if I play the sound file a few times and am quick enough to 
silence Jaws echoing my keystrokes and the Jaws report of the player's 
launch  fast enough so that I can hear the first few characters, it works 
out. But other times, I'm not only told that I need a sound card and 
speakers (they forget to add that I should make sure my computer's plugged 
in, too) but even the explanation that I need to have Real Player, etc. on 
my system.

But alas, I'm a WindowsXP user. So I find other ways to get around the 
problem with help from sighted friends or from the site's tech support. It's 
not a big enough problem in my life that I think I want to change my browser 
from IE 7, though.

Again, Gerald, thanks for explaining.

iginal Message ----- 
From: "Gerald Levy" <bwaylimited@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 5:14 AM
Subject: Re: What's Webvisim? (was Re: Participating in forums)



Webvisam is an add-on for the Mozilla Firefox 3 web browser that is
particularly appealing to blind users.  It has the ability to deal with the
image captia problem which often confounds many blind users on registration
web pages.  Captia is the string of characters that are displayed on a web
page that a sighted user is supposed to type into an edit field to complete
the registration process.  By pressing Alt-Control-6,Webvisam automatically
inserts this character string into the clipboard so that it can be easily
pasted into the appropriate edit field.  Many blind users have found this to
be such a boon that they have switched from IE to Firefox. Unfortunately,
Firefox is still not completely JAWS-friendly, so its probably best to use
IE as the primary browser most of the time, and Firefox when you need
Webvisam's image captia capabilities.  Webvisam does not currently work with
IE.





----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Yardbird" <yardbird@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <jfw@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, October 17, 2008 4:53 AM
Subject: What's Webvisim? (was Re: Participating in forums)


>I Googled it but got only three hits, all of them messages from the PC
>Audio
> list, none of which explain what it is. A program, I assume. But for what?
>
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