I heard remote assistance is hard to use with routers and the like, as they
block all unrequested, incoming connections. It gets tricky if the services
use a lot of ports, as do many of these and other services. Are there any
services out there that do this cheap, as some of these sites require you to
verify on every login.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Monty Icenogle KD6CAE" <monty@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <blindcasting@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Thursday, October 20, 2005 12:55 PM
Subject: Re: Yahoo VV--RE: where to get pod safe music
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
