- From: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:34:26 -0700 (PDT)
- To: "'Silvia Pfeiffer'" <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>
- Cc: "'Gregory J. Rosmaita'" <oedipus@hicom.net>, <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
Silvia Pfeiffer [mailto:silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com] > > Very interesting indeed. It seems to indeed be a big accessibility > challenge. > > Do images get transferred onto braille at all? Could it be done > pixel-wise? I'm wondering if there could be a technical solution, even > if it doesn't exist yet. I've seen some interesting experiments with tactile processing of maps, etc., but the detail is also limited in some ways due to the amount of visual data required to be conveyed. Most of those experiments relied on some basic form outline's over-laid with image-map like area data. In situations such as where we normally see CAPTCHA's used that additional data would likely not be provided by the author. The problem with any kind of OCR-like solution here is that it is a race to the bottom - if OCR does get better, CAPTCHA's will continue to get increasingly complex to frustrate that improvement - a vicious circle with no end in sight. At some point, the CAPTCHAs also become increasingly difficult for sighted users to negotiate, further frustrating your user base. The foundation of the solution is flawed, thus any implementation of that solution will also be flawed: being able to discern what a series of glyphs represent does not represent cognition, which is what CAPTCHAs are trying to determine (man vs. machine). I personally hold out more help for distributed authentication schemes such as OAuth, etc. which requires a one-time determination of 'authenticity' of your human-ness, after which you have a social key that can be used inter-changingly. We are already starting to see solutions like this emerge, where you can 'log-in' to locations using your FaceBook account, G-Mail account, your twitter username etc. Establishing disabled-user support groups as CA like entities could help here (for example, the RNIB could assist non-sighted users in the UK by confirming them with an OAuth profile, which they then could use) - ultimately what we have here (I believe) is a social issue, which will require a social solution JF
Received on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 21:35:00 UTC