Is Google Shutting Out The Blind?

Accessibility activists charge that search goliath Google shuts blind people out of many of its services.

“Google was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Joanmarie Diggs, curriculum director for Carroll Tech, a program that teaches disabled people workarounds for barriers to their use of technology. “How many cool things can Google come up with that block people who are blind?”

The problem is the “captcha,” the distorted letters that users must decipher and type into a box before they register for a service.

Google uses captchas during registration for the many betas and non-search offerings, such as Blogger.com and Gmail. Captcha is an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart.” Developed by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, they’re used to separate the humans from bots in Web site registrations, preventing large-scale automated registrations that can then be used to send spam.

Many vision-impaired computer users employ screen readers, software applications that convert text and graphics — as long as the graphics have descriptive “alt” tags — into audio. The speech simulator can read menus and the names or descriptions of navigational elements such as buttons and links. But screen readers are stymied by captchas.

Google is working on it, said Marissa Mayer, director of consumer products. “We are planning on releasing some alternatives in the next one to two months that make our current captchas more compatible with screen readers, and we’re looking into audio captchas,” Mayer said.

Read the whole article on Internetnews.com