Web Site Accessibility Blog

I thought I was over Reality TV, until I happened upon RockStar:INXS.

Normally, I would never write about this, so be patient. If you could care less about this, scroll down - MSN is forcing the captcha now . . .

Anyhow, when i first watched this last week, I was impressed with the talent and energy that the singers brought to the stage. They are competing to become the next lead singer of INXS, and last week was a hopeful indicator of some good talent. I thoroughly enjoyed last weeks show and loved to hear the great covers of great classic rock songs. JD’s performance of California Dreamin’ was amazing, and Ty amazed me with his rendition of Pat Benatar’s “Heartbreaker”. The women showed that could compete with the men as Jordis nailed Nivana’s “Heart Shaped Box” and Deanna rocked the classic Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go.” Now you know my favorites to win.

Ok, so it’s a festival of memories for those of us that grew up in the 80’s.

This week was an entirely different story. I’ll be nice and say I was amazingly disappointed. Apart from a few good performances, they were nowhere near the mostly solid “wow” performances of last week. My guess is the singers are paranoid and picking the songs to sing out of fear of getting voted out, rather than of appreciation and desire to win.

All that aside, in order to vote for your favorite performance of the evening, you are asked to go to the website at rockstar.msn.com and vote, or text and pay the charges. Of course, I go vote online, as I have yet to figure out the text feature on my new phone, and hey, it’s easier on the web. . .

Behold, what does MSN use as a method of preventing automated voting? Yup, the dreaded CAPTCHA!

Can you distinguish the characters? I failed this one. Apparently, that last character is not a “J”. I could only imagine the problems many people were having with this “security measure.”

The only text on the page?
Match the characters in the picture.
To continue, type the characters you see in the picture.
The picture contains 8 characters.

Wow. Not only was I amazed to see NO alternative, NO explanation for those who cannot read or understand the image, it was one of the most difficult captcha’s I had ever used. Really - I failed to copy the right letters two out of four attempts.

Nice, MSN. It’s not like Google and Yahoo made news about this in the past few weeks. According to this article at Internet News, MSN supposedly has an accessibility team and a work-around for the captcha. So where is it? What are the options for blind and low vision viewers? Not only that, what about those that cannot understand the cryptic picture that is provided? Is it such a small segment of the population that it doesn’t matter?

The word “picture” can be repeated 3 times in three sentences, but there is no plan to provide alternatives to a significant segment of people that rely on the web to interact with their favorite shows? Did I also mention that this is an international show, and Canada, Australia, Singapore, Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Indonesia are all included in the voting?

Amazing.

There is an address for problems voting, I would suggest that people use this when voicing their disappointment at the lack of accessibility.

From the MSN Rockstar Site FAQ:

If you have problems casting your vote and need more information on when your area should vote, please send an e-mail message with full details of your location, what time you view the show and how you tried voting to rockstarvoteinfo@MSN.com.