Category: Let's talk
Title says it all; when registering for a website, now days, you must specify the letters that you see in the picture, or whatever it is. It's to prevent automated registration, but it screws blind people over. For example, I tried registering for a xanga website, but couldn't because of the picture. With some sites, they have it set up so that the letters in the picture are played to you by your speakers with the real player, but most sites do not have that.
So, what (If anything,) can we do?
Brice
How retarded! Die, unaccessibility, die! I've never comeacross that, actually... but now that I think about it, I remember my friend Hannah asking me about that afew months ago. Stwange...
Hi Bryce,
The topic of thhis post scared me to death, for a moment, I thought I was going to have to do that before I could read this post, lol, I really did. Seriously though, other than calling a sighted person in to help you, I don't know of a thing that could be done. I had that thing come on on myspace.com, and friendster.com. I can't communicate with anyone on hi5 privately, unless they send me a friend request, but forthat, they have to know your email address. I can post to groups, I can add people pages to my book marks, but I can't send them a friend request, or even send a message to a book mark because of that thing. I wonder if us blind folk could ask them to put it in plain text? Someone told me jaws can't read it because the text is too fancy. I wonder if it could read the letters if they were written in plain text? The only sight I know that will play the audio test for you is live journal. It's one thing to get my mom to read the leters just to sign up, but she'd have to do it everytime I wanted to send a message privately, or send a friend request. If someone from a group wants to ad me, I have to give my email address on the group I'm in, then I can choose the accept link, that person is added, and all is well. I'm not that particular about giving my email address anyway, if I get a bad email from someone, I can just block them. I'm beginning to thing myspace.com is the real pits though.
wonderwoman
Ugh, I hit that today trying to get a g-mail account. It doesn't happen all that often though.
I had something similar happen when trying to buy tickets from ticketmaster.com. I ended up not being able to order online and had to use the phone to order which took longer and prevented me (probably) from getting seats as good as I would have gotten if I had been able to order faster online.
hmm, I hate that as well, but one the day something really did freak me out since I was in my hotmail acount and I was going to re-send a message to a friend I know and also I was going to write an e-mail to someone but the problem was the same, match the leters or numbers in the picture... the only thing I did was e-mail support and now they have this funny little distorted sound files... hope every compan does that from now on... lol
I had to try about 3 or 4 times with livejournal before I got it right, because that robot voice was sort of distorted, but at least, I have a chance with it, where with that stupid type the letters or numbers in the picture thing.
wonderwoman
oh I hate msn's files they're terrible. And yeah, it's really annoying. i tried it with the pk hoping that would work, but that didn't either...it is the lose.
hey!!! I had the same problem!!! I tried to sign up for Xanga and couldn't because of the damn picture letter thing!!! I think it sucks like hell!!! I live alone and do not have the privilege of having a sighted person come and read the pictures for me and therefore, can not sign up for anything like that.
*sexy*
I wonder if those that can understand html, if you can read the source and get the word that way? I'm not that good with html so maybe someone with more experience can try it and let us know.
Oh I hate that. I can't sign up for any of the free email accounts (hotmail, gmail, yahoo) without help from a sighted person. And the audio they have on lj sucks. You can try a few times and you still won't understand anything.
I tried looking through the HTML with yahoo but didn't work.
It's not a problem at all for me. this is due to the fact that if there isn't a voice file, well I've got sighted friends and would therefore apply the simple logic of getting an account whilst one was present to help me with that. It's inconvenient, but since I have no ddifficulty intigrating witth sighted people, it's not a problem for me and it never will be.
Yeah I hate that !!! I have a hotmail account for e mail and sometimes I cant' acess it unless I type in the letters I see in the picture, but I cna't see them so what good is that ? I think a bunch of us blind and visually impaired people should talk to those people who make up these websites, they don't think about the disabled , this world is geared to the sighted, but they're also disabled people living in it too
i had to do that when i registered with xanga, and i absolutely hate it. its frustrating, cuz there arent always sighted people around who could help us. i dont think theres anything we can do about it though, except hope that they change it somehow.
Believe me but even though I am sighted I also hate those "look at the picture and type the message" things! Why? Because the letters and numbers in the picture are scrambled up and many times it is not clear if it's an "A" or a "4" as the 2 look similar or an "l" and a "1" that look almost identical. Yesterday, I wanted to sing up for a LiveJournal and it took me 3 tries, yes believe it or not... 3 TRIES! before I finally got the correct message typed. If that was annoying for me, I can sure understand your frustration guys!!! Star
I can understand it as well! And I think the only thing that we can do right now is to email the website makers to make the audio captures and such more accessible to blind and visually impaired people. After all, we'll have to use our advocacy skills down the road --I'm sure of it. Let's advocate for all blind people!
Macy
I like the way that the zone does it, you select the things that has something to do with a topic they give you. I don't know however if that works as well as the "!Type what you see!" IDK, maybe they could do that instead., What the Zone does.
a lot of websites like lj are starting to use a company called recaptcha who provide anti-spam systems. i've tried contacting recaptcha but they said that visual images were the only real secure option. i explained about the zone's anti-spam system and they said that spammers don't care about small websites and that this method was not secure for big sites like lj. oh and ur browser needs to support javascript links in order to use the audio captcha so if like me u use a braillenote, then forget it, ur screwed! in the meantime, there is an add-on for firefox called web visum. this add-on will allow u to solve captchas. u can get more info here i believe u need firefox version 3 or higher to use web visum.
HTH