Last night, I began listening to J.C. Hutchins’ 7th Son podcast novel. Though not perfect, the Apple hosted web platform on which the site is hosted is mostly accessible enough to allow participation by blind listeners. Right now, however, there is one unfortunate exception. Features such as the ability to post comments are protected by a visual CAPTCHA that does not deliver a reasonable accomodation that would afford blind and visually impaired people the ability to participate.
In Need a hand, re: CAPTCHA compliance, J.C. Hutchins promises to contact Apple concerning this issue. I will be quite interested to know their response, if any, on this matter. I also thank J.C. for his prompt willingness to take this bull by the horns and work toward a resolution. Of course, the podcast is a great listen! It is full of clones, conspiracies, memory duplication and other similar themes I enjoy reading about in science fiction novels.
I just have to vent. this whole visual verrification thing has really gotten out of hand. More and more I find myself unable to do even the simplest things on the web because I can’t complete the visual verrification. My wife is always willing to assist me, but I frankly am getting fed up with having to ask her. I am starting to think that screen reading technology is going to have to come up with the solution, rather than expecting every inaccessible web site to change its ways. Can’t some sort of OCR tecnology be built into a screen reader that could decipher the characters in a graphic?
Bob,
Unfortunately, this is one area where our assistive tech companies probably can’t and won’t be able to step up to the plate. As soon as OCR is able to crack CAPTCHA, it will thus be open to attack by scripts and will have to be changed, once again making it inaccessible.
All the same, yes, it is ridiculous, and clearly discriminatory once the web site operator has been notified and fails to choose to do the right thing. Maybe, ultimately, we’ll need some sort of legislation dictating a consequence for locking us out. Agree this is totally out of control!