Support Or Educate?
A great deal of website development effort and time can sometimes be spent creating facilities that allow site visitors to carry out fairly mundane changes such as increasing the text size, printing pages or even just jumping back up to the top of a page.
The sad things is that many of these functions are already present in most standard web browsers. So developers are often needlessly replicating browser functionality within sites. and why do they do this? Because so many users don’t seem to know how to make best use of their own web browsers. Admittedly, the web browser developers haven’t helped by hiding some of the most useful options within sub-menus but, at the end of the day, it is arguably the responsibility of users to learn how to operate their own software.
Yahoo Make A Boob?
Having created an excellent video demonstrating how JAWS work with web sites, Yahoo then seem to have shot themselves in the foot by simultaneously using a graphical CAPTCHA on their form for new account registrations. Unlike some of the more sympathetic CAPTCHAs, this one doesn’t even offer any form of audio support.
As a result, visually-impaired or blind users cannot create an account without asking a sighted person for help. Or alternatively, Yahoo suggest that you leave a phone number and wait to be contacted. Similar experiences with Gmail a while back suggest that you may end up waiting to be contacted for a week or 2 — which doesn’t exactly make for a fair, non-discriminatory approach. Since then, Google has been adding audio alternatives to its CAPTCHA enabled registration services.
Blind users are currently petitioning Yahoo to make an audio file available alongside their graphical CAPTCHA. I only hope Yahoo are listening and agree to add audio support to their registration form as soon as possible. Otherwise, there is a real risk that they could end looking more than a little hypocritical.
The Problem With CAPTCHAs
“CAPTCHA” is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”and is a test for determining whether a given user is a human being or another automated system. The tests are based upon the concept that a computer will not be able to respond correctly to certain kinds of questions. If the correct solution is entered, the presumption is that the respondent is human. On this basis, CAPTCHAs may be considered when you want to prevent automated systems from gaining access to specific web services such as using an online contact form, registering for an online account or posting on a forum.