[gui-talk] help subscribing to blindtech, please!

[Joel Deutsch]

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As I wrote earlier, I am having trouble subscribing to the blindTech mailing 
list. I knew without going to the site that to sign up there would require 
requesting help from Yahoo staff because I couldn't get past the CAPTCHA 
that's the last step on the sign-up page.

So, hoping the conventional alternative of subscribing by email would work, 
I emailed the subscribe address (blindtech-subscribe at yahoogroups.com) and 
received the conventional request for confirmation. I replied to it as 
you're supposed to. Now, with most groups to which I've subscribed by email, 
this is all you've got to do. Once you send back the confirm email, next 
thing you receive is your welcome message and list instructions.

But as has happened to me before with Yahoo lists, I sent in the 
confirmation reply and nothing came back. Not yesterday, not today. It's not 
hung up waiting for the mod to approve me. It just isn't going to come. I 
know this from experience.

So I thought maybe if I clicked on the link within the confirm request, it 
might take me to a page where I'd just be told Congratulations, and then a 
welcome message would be emailed to me. That is done with some things like 
this.

But no such luck. Instead, I was taken to the same sort of page I'd already 
been to, rendering the email approach no kind of workaround at all. Again, I 
had to enter some info, and then respond to the CAPTCHA.

So I gave up, despite my memory of lousy service on the tech assistance 
issue at that point, and clicked through to the form you're supposed to use 
to ask for help with this procedure.

I filled out the form, supplying everything the starred fields asked for, 
and writing a short note in the appropriate space to explain I needed help 
getting past the CAPTCHA  as I was a screen reader blind user.

I clicked on Send. But what I got wasn't a screen confirming that my request 
had been submitted, but just the identical screen, with a few of the fields 
needing to be filled in yet again, though I'd filled them in the first time. 
Meticulously, I did it all over, and pressed Send.

Then I got the same thing. Except, as happened the first time, there was no 
error message, which is what you'd expect if you kept getting this response 
after submitting a form. I tried it one more time. Same result. This is 
totally crazy. And this was a different form than what I remember from the 
last time, because it didn't ask you for a phone number, only your email 
address.

BTW, there are two links that say to click on them for help. The first one 
says if you need help signing up, click on it. That was this one.

There's also another link to click for help. One of them says "if you can't 
see this" and I forget which that is-- but they both lead to the same help 
form page, one of which is titled a Beta of some sort.

This is way crazy. anyone know what I might be doing wrong? Or does anyone 
know the mod's email so I can just ask them to subscribe me? I really hate 
Yahoo Groups. I mean the service, not the people in the groups. :-)