Captcha Identifies Humans : Low Vision & Blindness Restricts Access

You have encountered it everywhere on the web whenever you register online on various websites – Captcha (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. A common type of captcha requires that the user type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen.

Captchas are used to prevent bots from using various types of computing services. Applications include preventing bots from taking part in online polls, registering for free email accounts (which may then be used to send spam), and, more recently, preventing bot-generated spam by requiring that the (unrecognized) sender successfully pass a captcha test before the email message is delivered.

Captcha and Blindness
However, Captchas based on reading text or other visual-perception tasks prevent visually impaired users from accessing the protected resource. For non-sighted users (for example blind users), visual captchas present serious problems. Because captchas are designed to be unreadable by machines, common assistive technology tools such as screen readers cannot interpret them. Since captchas are often used in initial registration processes (for example eBay and Yahoo!, and some other sites), this challenge can completely block access. Maybe audio recognition can be a solution… [via Wikipedia]