Tag Archives: Accessibility

#GAAD: On CAPTCHA

Posted on by John

Today, May 16, is Global Accessibility Awareness Day. Its purpose is to increase awareness of and understanding around why sites and components of sites need to be accessible. Of course complete accessibility refers to much more, ensuring that all areas of life are available to persons with disabilities. But I think this day has a primary focus of digital and web accessibility. In that spirit, I want to show what can happen when the various accessibility issues have not fully been addressed.

I made a post way back in 2006 in Live Journal, (remember that? Almost 20 years ago now!) In this post, I railed against CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (Taken from This site.) First, that’s a mouthful. And second, it has been the vain of my existence since its inception. In those days, those of us who were totally blind were pretty much left out of the experience entirely. This meant that, for example, we could often not sign into websites that had put CAPTCHA in place, because we couldn’t “type the characters you see on the screen.”

Eventually, and I’m sure with a lot of elbow grease and advocacy, web developers began to understand that there were a significant number of individuals who were being barred from accessing their products because of this spam-fighting tool. So they answered the call by creating audio CAPTCHA, where words or numbers are spoken aloud, often with some kind of noise in the background to make it harder for computers to pick up what is being said. The voice is also usually not completely clear. And this works for a lot of totally blind people, meaning they are able to “pass the test” and get done whatever it is they are trying to accomplish.

The problem? What happens if you have little or no hearing and partial or total blindness. I am totally blind and significantly hard of hearing, so even the clearest spoken language can be hard for me to follow. If they deliberately make it hard to understand what is being said, I will be lucky to get, say, two of the five words they say correct.

I had this happen just yesterday. While trying to complete a recovery of my Microsoft Outlook account (I locked myself out because I couldn’t remember the password, another issue about which I could write an entire entry,) I encountered one of these lovely CAPTCHA. I switched from visual to audio and must have tried eight different sets of words before I gave up in frustration. I’ll have to get that sorted eventually, but at least I’m still receiving email to my account. I assume it will be lost if for some reason I log out of my Outlook.

Ovviously, this can cause much bigger issues if one cannot access a site that uses either visual or audio CAPTCHA, and as far as I know deafblind individuals don’t really have a way to get past it without sighted assistance. I did try to have some of the various AI solutions locate and read the characters on the screen, but I don’t think they are easy enough to discern.

I guess I’m wondering why we even use these methods, in the age of two-factor authentication. Maybe a code could be texted to a user’s phone? I know this would not be a complete solution as some folks do not have phones that can read text, but it would allow many more to have easy access.

Alternatively, I’ve seen some sites that ask relatively easy math questions for the person to solve to prove their humanity. Whatever the case, I hope people continue to be aware of this issue and the very real stumbling block it puts in some people’s path.

And My Mom Got Scared: My Thoughts on the Peacock Show “Bel-Air”

Posted on by John

As soon as I came across this show, I knew I had to check it out. If you recall from the HBO Max post I did a couple years ago (a couple years already? Wow!) you’ll know that I’m a big fan of the show Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. And while I don’t usually care for reboots in general, I figured this one might be interesting.
Before I get to my thoughts about the series though, I first want to comment on streaming apps and accessibility from a blindness perspective. This has improved markedly in those two years, and I know we have many tireless folks working in the background to thank for that. Now, unlike then, I can interact with most of the apps’ interfaces and get them to work, instead of or in addition to using the Apple TV app to launch shows. And thankfully, most shows are also including audio description, which for the uninitiated is a track that explains to those of us who are blind the visual aspects that we would normally miss. I saw that Bel-Air had this, so I opted to pony up for the lower tier Peacock subscription that requires watching ads. There are only a couple ads per set, and they are a lot shorter than one sees on regular TV anyway.
So that noted, I shall speak a little about the show itself. Immediately, one is struck by the vastly different tone that “Bel-Air” takes compared to the TV show from which it draws inspiration. This is in no way comedic, as we see right from the start when Will Smith’s original Fresh Prince rap is played out and he “got in one (not so) little fight” on the basketball court. This fight ended in gunshots, and found Will behind bars. After his uncle springs him with a little help from his friends, Will is taken from Philadelphia to Los Angeles where he encounters Jazz. Jazz is a driver, and he gives Will a lift to the Banks residence in a car that bears some resemblance to that referred to in Will’s song as well.
The characters have similarities and big differences from those we saw in the original series. Will, ironically played by an actor with the actual last name Banks, sounds a lot the same but perhaps a bit flatter in emotional and vocal affect. Hilary and Jazz are both still kind of strange, but in less silly ways than they had been. They do end up drifting together as the show goes on in a more realistic way.
Ashley is only minimally seen throughout much of this season, but she does provide a rare platform from which to look at how LGBTQ issues play out in the Black community. This idea is spoken of little anywhere, and it certainly is rarely examined in a television program.
And Carleton? Well at first we are given the impression that he is just a complete jerk. But slowly his anxiety and illicit drug use reveal themselves, and the character’s actions become more understandable. If you think about it, you could certainly see some vestiges of that in the original show’s Carleton character. Finally, the way that Lisa and Will come together is also more realistic. She’s a long-time family friend who had dated Carleton, but their relationship was already starting to fall apart before Will drifted into the picture.
This series presents more like a long movie than the episodic Fresh Prince, and I think one has to watch the shows in order to follow entirely what is going on. But I thoroughly enjoyed the drama, feeling like it really started to find its way by season’s end with a show that was, when seen against the previous series, a combination of the famous show where Will encounters his father (Season 5) and the show that ended Season 1. It was a powerful episode, and it leaves us ready and willing to watch the Season 2 that I hope is coming.

Wordle’s The Word: On Internet Trends and Accessibility

Posted on by John

In a recent NPR story on what they called Garbage Trends, they noted that these sorts of trends arise on the Internet all the time and are often gone within a week or so. They are, I suppose by their nature, very visual and lack features that would make the accessible to blind and low vision people, as well as to folks with other disabilities that might require modification for full interaction.
But I think one of the cool things that is happening is that so many within our own community are learning how to create software or code that can render something usable far more quickly than an app’s developers, who are often hesitant to “look into the matter,” are willing to do. Such is the case with this new Internet word game called Wordle.
I remember the first time I saw someone’s Wordle post on Twitter and all I hear was something like “White square? White Square? Green Square” etc. I wondered hat on earth was that, becoming curious because I do enjoy playing word games, despite rarely being any good at them. I slowly saw more and more of these posts dotting my timeline, even among big-time folks, and yes I guess they’ve already hit that point of saturation that generates a lot of annoyance from those who no longer care to see such silliness. I can understand that, but I also wanted the ability to participate in the fun a little bit, especially driven by, as noted in that NPR story, the constant drudgery of the pandemic and related bad news.
So when I saw a Blind Bargains article detailing how one might set up the computer or phone with accessible code that someone created that would allow one to play Wordle, I bit. As one can see from clicking the above link and then the accessible Wordle page from within, getting things going with anything other than Google Chrome, which allows for simply adding an extension, is complicated. So I opted for the easy route and had mine up and running in a matter of moments.
The Wordle site generates one new word a day, and you have six attempts at guessing its five letters. It then tells you if you have correct letters, letters that are in the word but in the wrong place, or absent letters. I think I took five out of six guesses to get the first word and four out of six to get the second.
I just look at it as good, clean fun that allows me to feel like I’m “in it” with everyone else for the short time that this trend will likely last. And the implications of such nimble accessibility solutions being possible are not to be overstated either, namely in the potential for quicker adaptation to needed software for one’s job. So I’m delighted to see that we are able to come up with such powerful community-based solutions, and wish I were versed enough in their background, coding, scripting, and the like, to do some of that myself. Even so, I will just appreciate the efforts of others and hope that it inspires the initial creators to start taking wide-ranging access needs into consideration at a product’s creation, rather than it having to be built in later.

To The Max: On HBO’s New App and Accessibility Challenges

Posted on by John

Yay, Fresh Prince is finally available through streaming. This was my thought as soon as they rolled out HBO Max this past Wednesday, as I’d heard that this one of already so many streaming services would be the one to cary that show. So I knew I would immediately try to get it and see what, if anything, they have in the way of accessibility.

The short answer, at least at the time of this article’s writing as I know and hope that things can change quickly, is not a whole lot. The challenges began as soon as I downloaded and launched the HBO Max app. Fortunately you can connect the app to Apple TV and find shows that way, but in order to do that you must first subscribe.

At first, I swiped around on the screen and it just kept repeating the immediately viewable icon, until I had the bright idea of touching the screen in different places, a method called Explore by Touch. I eventually encountered a button labeled Subscribe Now and tapped it. I was able to enter my username, email and password, but when I tried to press “done” it wouldn’t take. I later deduced that this was because I had not checked the box accepting their terms, as I could not even find said box except on the HBO Max website. So I was forced to use that to sign up, after which I discovered that the web site worked little on the Mac and I could not actually sign in once the account had been created. So back to the phone, I guess somehow shutting and restarting the app made a usable sign-in button appear that I could press and enter my account info, and finally I was ready to go!

A subscription costs $14.95 a month, but it could be worth it as they have several good movies, documentaries, and series. In addition to the Fresh Prince, which I intend to watch in its entirety over the next few months because of the nostalgia (ah, simpler times, well not really but they always seem so when looking back right?) They have the series From the Earth to the Moon, which chronicles America’s Space race with the Soviets. I also saw The Big Bang Theory, which I didn’t watch when it initially came out but might catch now.

However, if the app does not make accessibility improvements in the coming months, honestly it boggles my mind that they would release it without these in the first place these days, then I probably will no longer fork over my dough. I am glad they have closed captioning for individuals who are deaf. I had hoped that, at least with HBO programming, they would include audio description for those of us who cannot see, but as far as I can tell this is not available. Also, because of the way one must interact with the screen, the app is completely inaccessible with a refreshable Braille display. If one could not connect it to Apple TV, then I would definitely have to hold out for some kind of improvements. Please take a look at your competitors, Amazon, Netflix and the like, and follow some of what they’ve done. After all there’s no need to reinvent the wheel. But we blind folks and others with disabilities want to be able to come along for the ride.