By Bernard Maldonado
I thought I would share with you, the captive audience, about a success story regarding a modified ReCaptcha Captcha on a website.
The problem was that a site, Wakerupper.com, had modified the ReCaptcha tool so that it did not offer the audio alternative. As a result, a visually impaired person is required to take additional steps to negotiate the barrier.
A bit about Wakerupper: This is a site that allows you to program a specific time for you to receive a phone call and hear a message that you preset. They have a list of interesting uses for Wakerupper on the website, including “escape from a boring meeting or date”. You can learn more by visiting the website. I’ve never used it, but it looks like a great service!
@EatBird on Twitter was trying to use Wakerrupper. He asked me to take a look at the site and see if I could understand why they did not offer an audio alternative, which is a feature built into ReCaptcha.
I examined the form and determined that the audio portion had been omitted for some reason.
After this, I found their @wakerupper Twitter address and respectfully asked them to please re-incorporate the audio alternative and briefly explained why. Along the way, a few other peeps also mentioned the issue to their followers on Twitter.
Within a day, the Wakerupper Captcha issue was solved! A follow up visit to the site revealed that the audio alternative had been restored and was working correctly. They had also reached out with a reply on Twitter acknowledging the issue and the fast repair.
What a great response on their part to a simple request to make their website more accessible. Thank you, Wakerupper, for addressing this quickly.
The reason that I mention this is to let people know how easy it is to make a difference in web accessibility.
All it takes is one person to tell a few others. A few tweets later, coupled with a cooperative website administrator, and we have a success story.
If you notice a website with an inaccessible captcha, let someone know. If you browse a site with an issue that you think can be fixed easily, share it with your followers on Twitter. You might be pleasantly surprised with the outcome!
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