We continue to be locked out of full and equal participation by Six Apart, developers of the TypePad blogging platform, due to an inaccessible CAPTCHA used for account creation and posting comments to blogs. In the past, numerous attempts to contact the company have gone ignored. Now that it has come to our attention that various members of the disability community use TypePad as their blogging platform, despite its inaccessible CAPTCHA, it would seem to be time for another attempt at getting this issue properly addressed by Six Apart. All blind and visually impaired Internet users, along with those sighted people who care about what happens to us, are urged to use the Contact Us page on the Six Apart web site to ask the company to finally do the right thing by making their CAPTCHA accessible. I have already contacted Jane Anderson, Six Apart’s Media Contact, asking for her assistance in resolving this issue or devising a plan for doing so in preparation for another article in the works concerning TypePad bloggers in the disability community. It has been proven over and over again that, if we keep on publicly and privately discussing this issue of the inaccessible CAPTCHA lockout, it often does eventually get resolved. Let’s all keep the lights shining clearly on this challenge as we move toward more positive results.
Advocating full participation through equal accessibility.
As you know, Six Apart also does Vox.com I have a blog on this site and my blind husband started one, made a few posts (Richard Landau. Blind Man’s Bluff is his blog there). Be he was defeated by the Captcha and other features of the site. I communicated with tech person there who has a blog on the site as well. I sent him a link to the exact Freedom Scientific page where they talk to web site designers about how FS can analyse their site for accessbility. Silence. I’m so glad you are working with this company. Vox is a great site for us amateurs. I truly wish my husband could use it.
Unfortunately, thus far, Six Apart has chosen to completely ignore the letter I sent last weekend. I urge all of you reading this note to send one of your own to Jane Anderson asking her to work with the company’s management team and handle this from a public relations perspective. The company’s failure to reasonably accomodate us can be seen as a lapse in the overall character of the company with respect to the ways in which it may treat all its customers.