Ok, so I understand the need for verification. Web sites need to know if you’re a human being or a spam bot when trying to register for or use a service. When the visual verification system or captcha came out some years ago, it caused many accessibility barriers. The boxes are small, the characters sometimes so garbled that someone with low vision or dislexia would have trouble reading and typing them in. Of course a totally blind person would be completely left out, not being able to read the characters at all, and screen readers don’t recognize it as text.
So what were some alternatives? One of the solutions is
audio captia. You can click or press enter on a link and hear a set of numbers which you type into the edit box. This form of verification is now implemented by many popular web sites. But in almost every experience I have had with this, audio captia is not a viable solution. If you have ever tried to
listen to and understand these, you would find it very frustrating. After several tries, changing the characters heard and failed attempts, you might end up like me, ready to toss the computer out onto a busy street, from a very high window!!! I always have to either get sighted assistance, or wait for customer service from the offending site to register me, or try to get me past this barrier. Google, yahoo, facebook, these are just a few of the sites that use this method of verification. I don’t know what the solution is, but there has to be another way! Can they use security questions, or maybe just simply make the characters sound clearer and eliminate the background noises. Believe it or not, some folks have tried to come up with alternatives. One is called HIPUU and it uses sound clips and immages rather than distorted characters and numbers. Whatever the solution may be, don’t think that just because a web site adds audio captcha to their verification process that they are indeed now accessible.
All right, ranting is over, I just had to vent my extreme frustration with this. Give it a listen and see if you don’t agree. Just try to create a new account with google or facebook, and you’ll hear what I mean!!