Accessibility, Accessible Software 
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So the other morning I fixed myself a yummy cup of hot coffee. As I headed up my steps to my bedroom with my coffee, I didn’t know that our dog Sadie, a black lab/boxer mix, was hanging out at the top of the steps. As I approached the top step, Sadie decided to lick  me right in the mouth! My reaction? I screamed in fright at the top of my lungs and yes, my coffee spilt on me and Sadie… lovely! Luckily though, Sadie likes coffee too so it worked out for both of us. Well it kinda did.
This little run in situation between me and Sadie got me thinking though. As blind or low vision people, we often run into situations that we cannot see or are not accessible for us. One of those annoying situations is the visual captchas out there. You know the graphical letters and numbers we gotta type in to submit a form to sign up for some service or website.
The other day I went through a lot of steps on a website to sign up for a service and at the very end – step 9000 – it asked me to key in the graphical captcha and there was no audio challenge option to use… ugh! This got me thinking about a service that is pretty sweet so I wanted to share it with you.
In case you did not know this, there is a free service out there for blind or low vision individuals to help you fill in the visual captcha. The company is called Solona. Solona is headquartered in Texas in the United States. Solona’s Captcha Solution Service is a real-time service. Whenever a blind or low vision user submits a Captcha to be solved, a sighted volunteer operator receives that image, and returns the text to the user within one minute. Solona’s Captcha Service is compatible with all Operating systems, all browsers, and all web pages. Windows, Apple, IE, Fire Fox etc.
Because the Solona captcha service is ran by volunteers, you may experience the captcha service not being available all the time. In other words, the more volunteers they have on staff, the more available the captcha service is for everyone. So the opposite is true too, if there are very little volunteers, the captcha service will be unavailable. Solona has a link on their site for volunteers to sign up. If you know of any sighted person that may enjoy helping out, maybe consider passing on this blog post to him or her to read.
For more info on Solona, head over to www.solona.net and register for a free account. Once you register, just log in, choose captcha in the drop down and click the continue button. If there is no volunteer available to help with the captcha service, the captcha option in the drop down will be unavailable. Once you have chose captcha in the drop down and you have clicked continue, on the next page there are instructions on how to use the service.
Do you use Solona’s Captcha service? If you have used it, post a comment and let us all know what you think of it, ok?
Thanks and talk soon,
Justin