Check out this wonderfully written story of my life from Karen’s perspective. She did an excellent job on this special message. You may just learn a few new things about me in the process. Thanks, Karen!
vBulletin, a leading provider of online web based forum software, currently features an inaccessible CAPTCHA that provides no reasonable accomodations for blind and visually impaired users. This means that all forums based on vBulletin’s software currently show us the “No Blind People Allowed” sign during the registration process.
At this time, there is one way for forum administrators to work around this barrier. An independent developer has made a RECAPTCHA modification available to licensed vBulletin customers. This modification enables use of the ReCAPTCHA service, which includes an audio version of the CAPTCHA.
A reliable source at vBulletin reports that the upcoming version 3.7 release of the software will provide alternatives to the image verification process in the form of a “simple question” text based CAPTCHA. No date has been given for the 3.7 release at this time.
We ask all vBulletin forum administrators to promptly implement the ReCAPTCHA modification now and to utilize the text based CAPTCHA upon the release of version 3.7. Please make these straightforward modifications to your forums so that the blind and visually impaired will be allowed full participation.
Recently, we have discovered a rather disturbing trend. Even in cases where sites do provide us with an audio CAPTCHA, it does not always work. In many scenarios, no audio is heard at all! The ability to hear these audio CAPTCHAs often depends on which browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer) and which version of that browser is in use. It is absolutely critical for us to collect some test data in an attempt to resolve this issue in an effective manner. Please follow these steps and report your results as indicated:
Please provide your test results, along with any potentially helpful additional details, in comments to this blog post. Your active participation in this testing is absolutely critical in order to make sure that the audio CAPTCHA solutions we get are actually workable for the vast majority of blind and visually impaired computer users.
R07-21 Captcha
Now therefore, be it resolved by the American Council of the Blind, in convention assembled, this 6th day of July, 2007, at the Hyatt Regency Hotel, Minneapolis, Minnesota, that this organization strongly urges the United States Department of Justice to apply Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act  to website proprietors who deny access to their websites by users who are blind and visually impaired, through use of inaccessible CAPTCHA and to establish appropriate enforcement mechanisms that assure compliance with web access guidelines by website proprietors.
Be it further resolved that officers, directors and staff of ACB are directed to engage in consultation and to provide technical assistance to website designers, and standard-setting bodies to ameliorate the current egregious barriers to web access caused by current applications of CAPTCHA.
Netralia has just released version 1.0.0.39 of the CallBurner Skype call recording application. The enhancements and fixes in this release are listed as follows:
At this time, CallBurner version 1.0.0.39 has not been publicly posted on the company’s web site. It may, nevertheless, be downloaded directly as a public release in order to take advantage of the listed enhancements. Thanks go to Petro for this information.
Shownotes
Wow! It sure has been quite some time since we’ve done a podcast! Check out links to a few of the items we discussed. As always, please feel free to post your comments.
The Computer Science Assistive Technology Laboratory at Utah State University is seeking volunteers who are visually impaired to participate in an online survey.
The survey is part of a research project to discover how people with visual impairments describe and share descriptions of routes. A route is the path a person would travel to get from one location to another location. A route description, also known as route instructions or a set of directions, is the set of statements one person gives to another person so that the second person can successfully travel the route.
As we already know, there are more options besides audio and visual CAPTCHA that may be used to tell the difference between computers and humans. The open source project THaCAA – Telling Humans and Computers Apart Automatically represents another way to protect valuable web site resources without excluding anyone based on sensory factors such as hearing or sight.
We thank Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson for reading an e-mail I sent them concerning the need for CAPTCHA accessibility on episode 102 of their Security Now! podcast and discussing it in depth. This show even has an excellent transcript that serves to meet the needs of the deaf or those who would just rather read instead of listen. This is exactly the kind of positive exposure we need to seek for the CAPTCHA accessibility issue on a much more frequent basis. Let’s all sign the Yahoo! Accessibility Improvement Petition and take all possible actions to spread the word as far and wide as possible!