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Anti-Spam Webforms Leave Out The Blind
geekee writes "An article on CNET claims that a technique whereby a user enters a code word displayed in an image in order to register for a service such as an e-mail account discriminates against the blind. Advocacy groups for the blind are even hinting at lawsuits against companies using this practice. A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters. Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test."
Wall....Wall....Intruder's leg....Intruders stomache....Intruder's head
*BANG*
And let me just say I'm profoundly sorry about the subject line of this post.
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Hello, I am your seeing eye monkey from bonzai buddy, I can help you read the text off of the screen that you need to register for your e-mail account.
Would you like to.
1. have the selection recognized with ocr, and read to you.
2. send your personal information to us, along with the new e-mail account so we can send it to spammers.
3. Profit!@!@
(except in soviet russia where the OCR owns us)
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
So what would you prefer to do as a solution?
Remove the test altogether and let spammers have their way with free email accounts? If anything, why not create an e-mail service just for the blind that requires some other type of verification that they can use, but will still stop spammers?
Don't you understand this is the 21st century? If everyone can't do it then nobody should do it.
Except now, you had bums popping in a quarter, and having a free room for the night.
Free cookies to the first person that sees what's wrong with this sentence.
Ok, I will tell you, but do I have to give you a quarter to get the free cookies???
Maybe you should educate the morons of tomorrow so they'll stop believing the leaders of tomorrow. - Dogbert
Oh yeah, porn sites discriminate against the blind too you know! Ever tried to get off on a mouse-over image desc?
Is speech recognition so good now that sound would have to be played back from inside a '73 Pinto at the bottom of a swimming pool to keep a computer from parsing it?
Years ago, I told my Powermac 660AV "Computer, open window", and it shut down instead.
Granted, it was the only computer on the market that could do speech recognition thanks to a builtin DSP, and the integration with the Macintosh environment was superb- but it still would do the most amusing things.
Please help metamoderate.
Although if you're blind and deaf, you're still out of luck.
You ain't shittin'.
Now you're discriminating against the stupid. You can't do that - too many government employees, particularly the elected variety, would be kept out.
No, that's not what he's saying at all. The blind can't pass the distorted image test, so they clearly aren't people.
Well the lawyers are at it all websites should sue any blind/lynx visitors under the DMCA for circumventing ads and preventing the website from generatieng any revenue.
(weeee my first bad joke!)