Solona.net Captchha Solution Service Needs Volunteers
— ♣In a recent blog entry, Bernard Maldonado, founder of the Solona.net captcha solution service used by many visually impaired Mac users and others, frankly discusses the challenges facing the service. Solona now has over a thousand registered users, but still essentially only one volunteer donating his time and resources to solving captchass. Mr. Maldonado is appealing to users to help introduce and explain the service to sighted friends, family, and colleagues to bring additional volunteers on board.
We encourage our readers who currently, or may in future, benefit from the Solona service to read Mr. Maldonado’s blog entry and consider lending a hand to the recruitment new volunteers.
Captchas are images, typically displayed on web sites, which contain distorted text which must be deciphered and reentered into a form field. They are meant as a way to prevent spam bots and others from submitting for automatically, as they require a human to decode. They have long poised a substantial accessibility problem for visually impaired users, and are becoming increasingly more prevalent throughout the web. Though some larger sites also offer audio captcha, these are frequently indecipherable, or do not work properly.
Solona attempts to solve these problems by providing detailed instructions for blind and visually impaired users to anonymously submit captchas which are solved by a human operator and provided back to the user to complete the form that requires it.