March 10, 2005

Dear Yahoo Management Team:

I am a blind information technology professional, accessibility advocate and publisher of the Blind Access Journal found at http://www.blindaccessjournal.com. We are extensively covering the use of visual verification schemes and their impact on Internet users whom are blind or visually impaired.

Yahoo uses visual verification to secure such functions as the ability to create a new account or to manage a Yahoo Group. The user is expected to be able to see characters presented in a distorted picture and enter those same characters into an edit field. Yahoo’s only current method of providing accessibility is for the blind user to complete an online form and hope that someone calls back in a reasonable amount of time.

I and many of my blind colleagues have tried your accessibility solution to visual verification. While our sighted peers are able to perform tasks instantaneously after completing the visual verification process, we must wait 12 or more hours after completing the form for a call from Yahoo in order to complete the same tasks! These situations clearly show that the current access solution is totally insufficient. It serves to force the blind user to the very, very back of the bus!

Please provide better accessibility to your visual verification systems by providing a link to an audio version of the characters to be entered into the edit field, so that we may have the same level of access to Internet resources as our sighted peers. I look forward to a prompt positive response from someone in Yahoo’s management team concerning this critical issue.

Sincerely,

Darrell Shandrow