progress report on reCAPTCHA & request for assistance & advice

aloha, all! -- ben from the reCAPTCHA project has agreed to conduct the 
conversation about ensuring the accessibility of reCAPTCHA on the 
wai-xtech@w3.org emailing list...

here is ben's summation of the state of progress referenced in:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/wai-xtech/2007May/0048.html

--- begin ben's status report on reCAPTCHA ---

1. Accomplished:

* We fixed up the alt tags, that was an oversight on our part. 

* I had lunch with T.V. Raman, the author of Emacs Speak, he showed me a 
screen reader with reCAPTCHA, however it seemed to have issues with 
Javascript (T.V. said that he didn't use the windows screen reader 
much and that it was probably out of date -- I was looking at the browser 
visually as he used it, the javascript executed, but the screen reader 
didn't recognize it, it just bypassed the content that was added by 
reCAPTCHA). 

* We've looked into buying some screen reader software to do testing, 
though the software is expensive.  I'm not at the university over the 
summer, so I won't have access to this until August. 

* We now require only 7 of the 8 numbers in the audio CAPTCHA to be 
correct in order to increase the accuracy rate. 

2. Here's what we're still working on: 

* We're not sure what to do about the tabindex for the 
refresh/audio/help buttons. One of our goals is to make CAPTCHAs as easy 
to use with keyboard navigation for sighted users as well as non-sighted 
users.  As I mentioned in my previous email, many forms have a layout 
such 
as 

* Name 
* Blog Comment 
* reCAPTCHA 
* Contains image/audio, text box, and multiple buttons 

* Submit (a button) 

For a user who doesn't need to press the audio, refresh, or help 
buttons, giving a tabindex=-1 to the three buttons makes life easiest 
for them.  What's the best way to do this, but make the feature still 
accessible to users who need to use the keyboard?

* We're also pretty stumped as to what to do to actually play the 
audio.  Initially, we copied what Google did with their audio CAPTCHA 
(with the addition of the "can't hear the sound" link because our testing 
on Linux showed that some browsers weren't fully compatible with 
embedding). We need help in finding something that works better here. 

--- end of ben's state of reCAPTCHA report and request for assistance ---

since these issues cover the entire spectrum of WAI activity, i am 
posting 
this to the wai-xtech list, so that ben and the reCAPTCHA project can 
receive the most accurate, on-point input from all the members of WAI,
so please be sure to reply to the XTech list if you have any suggestions 
for ben (to whom i am CCing this status update)

thank you all for contributing to this very important work,
gregory.
----------------------------------------------------------
ACCOUNTABILITY, n. The mother of caution.
                 -- Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
----------------------------------------------------------
         Gregory J. Rosmaita, oedipus@hicom.net
      Camera Obscura: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/
   Read 'Em & Speak: http://www.hicom.net/~oedipus/books/
UBATS-United Advocates for Talking Signs: http://ubats.org
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Received on Wednesday, 11 July 2007 15:48:12 UTC