I posted an article on Solona.net about reaching one year of service.  http://bit.ly/9aVctp  I won’t repeat it here.

Everything about Solona is very rewarding and fulfilling.  This might sound silly, but I never imagined myself launching this kind of web service.  Now that it’s been one year that it officially launched, enough time has passed to reflect on different aspects of the service and how it has evolved.  What’s even more exciting is planning for the future!

The depth of inaccssible Captchas is much worse than I previously thought.  I was under the impression that Captchas were used mostly on website registration pages.  On the contrary, simply logging in to some web services requires a Captcha.  Webhost companies, financial institiutions, payment gateway sites - so many sites force users to answer a captcha in order to proceed with logging in.

Now that the Captcha Solution Service is refined, it’s time to expand the options for solving Captchas.  It’s clear that out-of-browser interaction is much more efficient for solving Captchas.  The Qwitter and Send2Solona clients clearly prove that.  Now is the time to focus on more API enhancements and functionality.

RAIVE will also get several upgrades in 2010.  The first release of RAIVE proved that we can provide seamless answers to questions about inaccessible images.

So here’s to one year down, and a bright many years of service ahead.

It’s never a bad idea to spend some quality time re-tooling the website.

New text, new images, column movements.

I spent about 5 hours re-writing some pages and re-working the front page layout.

The Thesis WordPress theme is quite user-friendly.  They also provide very good support.

I told myself that I’d like to wait until at least 100 unique voters (or at least 100 unique IP’s, lol).

The last question needed about one month to get to that point.

This latest question also represents a new direction for the Solona poll.  I’m not going to limit the poll questions only to Captcha-related topics.

So let’s see how long it takes to get to 100 responses.  Then I’ll have to get a new poll ready.

Gawd.  It’s only about 6 months late!

But the mailman list server for Solona is setup!  The idea is to use the mail list as a support mechanism for users.  Furthermore, new features and service updates will be channeled through the mail list.

The URL is:  http://lists.solona.net

There’s only one users list at this time.  I’m thinking about establishing a couple of other lists based on language.  Like maybe Spanish and Portuguese.

In addition, there will be a list setup for developers who participate in the Solona API expansion.

Many thanks to Brett and Keith for helping me get it setup!

I like it when people provide insight to candid questions.

In an effort to collect accurate information, I place a new poll at the top of the solona.net website each month.

The poll I just posted asks this question:  Under what web browsing circumstance(s) do you most often encounter a Captcha? You can select a maximium of two choices.

There are five choices from which to choose:

1. Website new user registration
2. Specific task within a site where you ALREADY have an account: (Yahoo groups admin, FeedBurner, CL Post, Google Groups mgmt, Gmail acct verify, FaceBook friend add, etc
3. Blog / Blog Comment
4. File Sharing / File Downloads
5. Website User Login / Sign-in (not new user account)

I hope to get around 150 unique voters for this poll.

I want to get some feedback from users.

Do users think it is important to offer an HTTPS connection for their Solona sessions?

It has been discussed among the team leaders, but there are some programming considerations and expenses that would be incurred.

I’ll leave the poll up there for a couple of weeks and see what the results are.

I found a great poll widget for Word Press called WP Polls

It looks great and works great with many features.  If you are looking for a polling widget and you use Word Press, I highly recommend WP Polls.

I was browsing around and stumbled upon this online review article about Solona.net . So I took a few moments to read it.  It was very nice to know that a user took time to compose and publish such an article. Thank you to “Fire Dancer”

—Bernard—
Solona a11y

Many websites use Captchas as a way to prevent unwanted registrations, forum entries, or blog post comments.

reCAPTCHA is one of the most widely used tools for Captchas on websites.  It is easy to implement, it is easy for users to solve and updates/enhancements are provided by the author.

Another valuable feature that is built into the security device is an audio captcha challenge.  The audio challenge allows vision impaired people to solve the Captcha on the website.

Unfortunately, many vision impaired internet users report that the reCAPTCHA Captcha is difficult due to a lack of information about the components.  As a result, users become frustrated and may be unable to negotiate the Captcha and proceed with their original goal on the web site.

For example, the visual Captcha is a set of two words that must be entered into an edit field within the reCAPTCHA space.  The audio challenge is in the form of a complete phrase.  In order to solve a reCAPTCHA audio challenge, the user must type in as much of the phrase as possible (upwards of 10 words).  Many users express confusion and do not understand why reCAPTCHA asks for two words, yet they hear a phrase that contains ten words.  In a sense, the instructions contradict the information provided to solve the puzzle.

What it comes down to is a lack of documentation that addresses the components in reCAPTCHA and how to properly use them.

In an effort to address this issue, Solona Accessibility established a reCAPTCHA Training Tool that provides practical information to vision impaired users regarding the reCAPTCHA interface.  In addition, a user can practice solving reCAPTCHA audio challenges over and over and keep score of their progress with game scorecard.  This tool is easy to use over and over since there is no online form to fillout before arriving at the Captcha.  The only element on the tool page is the reCAPTCHA Captcha.