All About Access

The [Blog Herald](http://www.blogherald.com “Blog Herald”) has written about the access issues posed by captchas! Excellent!! Read [“Google Under Fire for Excluding Blind Bloggers”](http://www.blogherald.com/2005/04/25/google-under-fire-for-excluding-blind-bloggers/ “Google Under Fire for Excluding Blind Bloggers”).
—jd

Today I have been playing with iPodder 2.0 (using JAWS 6.1). There have been some minor access quirks such as focus occasionally going into Never Never Land. But given that I’m running it without the benefit of any customized JAWS scripts, I must say that things are lookin’ good. You can download iPodder at [iPodder.org](http://www.ipodder.org/ “iPodder.org”).

So what’s your favorite Podcast?
—jd

At my alma mater, THE University of Texas (aka UT Austin):

Four groups of game designers pitched new electronic game concepts…. Audio Adventure, the winner in the most innovative game category, targeted the untapped market of the visually impaired.

[Read the article](http://www.dailytexanonline.com/news/2005/04/21/TopStories/Game-For.Visually.Impaired.Wins.University.Competition-932764.shtml “Game for visually impaired wins University contest”) at the Daily Texan.

(via [ACB Radio AT News](http://www.acbradio.org/pweb/index.php?module=phpwsrssfeeds&RSS_MAN_op=sView&RSS_id=9 “ACB Radio AT News”))
—jd

An article about some of the challenges faced by individuals who are blind—and it’s in the mainstream media no less! I saw it the other day on the website of a local paper, and now it’s on Yahoo News. [Read the article](http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=562&ncid=738&e=7&u=/ap/20050424/ap_on_hi_te/vision_tech “The Blind Struggle as Gadgets Proliferate”).
—jd

If you are like most people, you’ve probably never heard of a “captcha.” But if you’ve ever registered for a free service online, there’s a good chance you’ve seen one. The most frequently-used captchas are pictures of somewhat distorted letters and/or numbers. You, the computer user seeking to register for the service, are told to “type the characters you see in this picture.” By successfully completing this task, you are proving that you are a human being and not a computer program seeking to exploit the service in question. Of course what you’re really proving is that you are a sighted human being—or someone with access to a sighted human being. Captchas significantly limit equal access to information for users who are blind or visually impaired.

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The 2005 Index Braille catalog arrived in the mail today. I was flipping through it and read the following:

Tactile Graphics

WinBraille includes standard Windows image control and the unique feature to convert images to tactile graphic format on-line. Braille text can be pasted into any position utilizing the increased graphical resolution (0.5 mm). Supported image formats: BMP, TIF, WMF, PNG, JPG, JPEG, GIF, and SIG.

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I guess Google doesn’t get it when it comes to visual verification systems…. One might even suggest that they were being

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