[gui-talk] Looking for instructions for understandingFacebooknonvisually

[Lloyd Rasmussen]

The captcha is one of the disadvantages of working with Facebook.  Many
things have changed since the AFB article was written, but their discussion
of the captcha and the alternative procedure where they send a text message
to a cell phone of your choosing is still accurate.  Since I haven't gone
the texting route yet, I get a captcha for almost every friend request I do.
I don't solve all of their audio captchas on the first try, but I find them
much easier than some others I have encountered.  Busy corporations can
certainly be unresponsive sometimes.

Lloyd Rasmussen, Kensington, Maryland
Home:  http://lras.home.sprynet.com
Work:  http://www.loc.gov/nls
 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org [mailto:gui-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org] On
> Behalf Of Joel Deutsch
> Sent: Wednesday, July 22, 2009 12:57 AM
> To: NFBnet GUI Talk Mailing List
> Subject: Re: [gui-talk] Looking for instructions for
> understandingFacebooknonvisually
> 
> Gerald,
> 
> Not only is Dave correct about this, but I can provide one more example of
> the same thing, which is Amazon. If you know the site, as soon as the home
> page opens, Jaws is likely to say something about how, if you're using a
> screen reader, you might benefit from clicking on this link and going to
> their sort of mirror site. A lot of screen user people appreciate the
> simplified site with its low graphics and simplified layout, but Amazon
> didn't create that site expressly for the convenience of the blind Amazon
> customer any more than they introduced audio to Kindle for the sake of the
> blind. I'm not saying this cynically, and I don't think Dave meant it in
> that spirit either, or at least not entirely. it's just how it is.
> 
> The "Facebook team" is pretty much in the dark about blind computer users.
> I
> wrote them for help because for some reason I kept being asked to get past
> a
> CAPTCHA a few times *after* I'd managed to register (it only took me
> something like 20 minutes to find an "audio challenge" I could make any
> sense of and type to the system's satisfaction), and that problem was the
> crux of my request for help.
> 
> They replied with this sort of standardized (or boilerplate, as I meant to
> say) stuff about how to register, changed my pass, this and that, and in
> order to get going I had to sort of overcome their helpful tampering. Not
> once did they mention CAPTCHA technology in their reply. it all has worked
> out, so maybe I was never truly logged in and that's why, every time I
> tried
> to friend somebody, I got presented with that damn roadblock. But I don't
> think that was it. If it was, they didn't even bother to say so. They just
> went right to the registration issue without a reference to what I'd asked
> about. Duh. I'm not surprised that no one from the Facebook Team is
> playing
> in the All Star Game this summer. Sorry. Just feeling sarcastic about
> anyone
> who replies to me in writing online without sounding actually responsive
> to
> what I've written to them. That drives me completely nutty. I mean it both
> befuddles and offends me.
> 
> anyway, so much for the so-called "blind" Facebook site, okay? But it's
> got
> its uses, I can see that.