I have been friends with Aelis for almost 20 years now. We met initially through the Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA.) She had sent me this, and I checked it out. Notice, if you try to sign up for a new MySpace account, there is no way to get an audio prompt for the CAPTCHA (image with twister letters, etc) when you sign up. Since visually impaired folks use screen readers which can't decode images, they are effectively blocked from being on MySpace. Not cool!
I wrote to tech support and pointed this out, and got back a "this issue has been resolved" response. It hasn't.
It would be good if MySpace was open to everyone who wanted it. Maybe if enough of us who can say do, do in fact say something, we can change this?
Blind Access Journal Wednesday, May 02, 2007
MySpace Ignores and Locks Out the Blind, Puts Up "No Blind People Allowed" Sign
By Darrell ShandrowThere are a number of blind and visually impaired people who have written to me privately and to various e-mail discussion groups concerning the current accessibility challenges with the popular MySpace blogging and social networking web site.
LINK: http://www.myspace.com/
The most critical and immediate issue is a CAPTCHA (visual verification) appearing as part of the signup process. This CAPTCHA does not feature audio or any other method of gaining access if you are not able to see the characters you must enter into the edit box in order to register. Many blind and visually impaired people, including myself, have contacted MySpace over the past year. All such attempts at contact have been completely ignored. It is clear that the staff of MySpace do not see fit to show even an ounce of professional courtesy toward blind and visually impaired people by responding to media queries and other attempts at contact. We must all put MySpace on notice that CAPTCHA (visual verification) without audio or some other alternative way for blind people to complete the signup process locks out the blind and visually impaired in a manner similar to the "no blacks allowed" signs during the era of segregation.
While it may be clearly understood that this visual only CAPTCHA was initially put in place out of ignorance of the accessibility issue, continued disregard of our needs despite our good faith attempts at contact represents clear and deliberate discrimination against us. It is certainly not too late for the MySpace people to make the conscious decision to simply do the right thing in this case. Implement an audio playback of the CAPTCHA and supply an e-mail address or other contact information where people with disabilities may receive human assistance when it does not work as expected, the user happens to be deaf-blind, etc. I urge all of you whom
have not already done so to contact MySpace to register your accessibility
concerns and ask the company to do the right thing.LINK: http://www.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=misc.contact
Nice point! I'm going to bring this up to my students as well since we're talking about audience analysis.