A Simple Change Makes Twitter More Blind-Friendly

All it took was swapping CAPTCHA for reCAPTCHA as BA Haller noted in Media dis&dat:

Members of San Francisco's Lighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired appealed to Twitter executives during the company's first business conference in late May to make changes to its CAPTCHA security software and make it more accessible for the blind and visually impaired. CAPTCHA is the test near the end of most online registration forms where people are asked to read one or two wobbly words and type them. Its purpose is to avoid automatic computer-generated responses.

But it hinders independent navigation for blind and visually impaired users who rely on software that reads information on their computers aloud. Such programs often come to a stump when they try to decipher the CAPTCHA word garbles, leaving their users in a bind and unable to continue without someone else's help.

"In order to get past CAPTCHA, which my text-to-speech software can't pick up, I have to ask a sighted person to assist me, compromising the security of my personal information - the very thing that Twitter tries to avoid by using CAPTCHAs," said the Lighthouse's director of public policy and information Jessie Lorenz in a press release, who is blind.