The Irony of Google’s Celebrating Louis Braille’s Birthday While Locking Out the Blind

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Google is celebrating the birthday of Louis Braille by providing this Louis Braille Search. Though we thank Google for this gesture, we ask the company’s bright programmers to promptly implement a solution to the inaccessible visual verification scheme it has been using for over one year. In July of 2005, Google promised accessibility within “one to two months” and has, thus far, failed to deliver, thus continuing to barr the blind and visually impaired from full participation in all Google services.

We ask everyone in the blind community and all other interested individuals to take five minutes or less to compose an e-mail to accounts-support@google.com asking Google to finally allow full admission by the blind by adding accessibility to its visual verification for all services. Google has told the world in the past they did not receive feedback concerning the need for greater accessibility. Today, they should be hearing from hundreds, if not thousands, of blind people and others asking that Google follow its own mission statement to do no evil and “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Happy New Year!

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Shownotes

Karen and I wish you all a very accessible, happy and safe New Year! This is our brief 2005 year in review podcast. Enjoy.

  1. Karen and I become engaged on April 1. The proposal is the focus of Jeff Bishop’s The Desert Skies radio show on ACB Radio Interactive that Friday night. The show is also the first semi-official podcast of Blind Access Journal.

  2. Karen becomes part of the Distinguished Service Team on her job, showing once more the value of blind people in employment.

  3. Darrell is Employee of the Month in June of 2005, also exemplifying the recognized value of the blind.

  4. Darrell attends the Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference where awareness of accessibility concerns is effectively raised.

  5. Darrell gains significant exposure of accessibility issues as he has the opportunity to chat with Leo Laporte and his gang of TWiTs on This Week in Tech live from the expo.

  6. Darrell works with the GoDaddy Office of the President, resulting in positive, promising developments in the correction of the company’s currently inaccessible visual verification scheme. We will continue following up this communication in the new year.

Please work with us in 2006 and beyond to help insure an accessible world of technology in which blind people are allowed to participate on terms of equality with the sighted. Happy New Year!

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Blind Users v. the Internet

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Until recently I have been passive-aggressive on the entire visual verification issue, but today while attempting to reply to e-mail in Yahoo! Mail I was presented with Sender Verification. This is visual verification that yahoo is now placing on *every* outgoing e-mail you send.

I have verified it is every e-mail by sending a very simple message to myself with no trigger words.

The yahoo solution is the same stupid phone solution they have for other services that may or may not work.

Ladies and gentlemen now that Yahoo has extended this to its e-mail service it is only a short time before the problem reaches to other services like Hotmail.

Therefore, I am declaring war on all sites and systems of web based or electronic access that use visual verification in any way.

Big things will be happening on this front in the new year. I call on DREDF, DRA Legal, and any other interested parties (i.e. NFB or ACB) to take all necessary and appropriate legal action to address this growing problem online.

I personally don’t expect much to come from the two major consumer organizations in the United States on this since they seem more interested in other things like identifying money and fighting DVS.

I’m heading to Washington, DC in February and this *will* be on my agenda for discussion if it is necessary.

I will take personal action as well if I deem the other groups named above are not moving to address the problem.

However, until such time as public interest groups take up this issue I encourage you to go to the following website PlanetFeedback.com. You do not have to register, just choose the complaint radio button on the home page and in the search box that you tab to after the radio button enter yahoo or Google or any other company that you find using visual verification and then press enter. If the company name or any similar is in the database the site will return results. You also have to choose a category for your complaint. For our purposes you need to choose site navigation. If not in the database you have the opportunity to enter the companies contact details. If you cannot find a companies contact details to enter in the database send me an e-mail at rlynch80 at sbcglobal.net and I’ll get its information for you.

Once you have the company you need to write a detailed and well thought out complaint letter to the company. I suggest writing this letter using notepad and then copying and pasting it into the field you are provided by PlanetFeedback. You will also have a field for what you want the company to do. Here I suggest you discuss an audio feedback system or better yet for sites that you need to register for they can use an e-mail based verification or even a question based system like How do you spell dog, or What color is a red rose.

More coming on this in the new year, and oh yeah Marry Christmas.

Christmas Preparations, GoDaddy Visual Verification Update, New Baby Marin and More

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Shownotes

Only two full days till Christmas begins!

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