OT: Please sign the Google word verification petition - John Esak

[John Esak]

HI all

I know this list has a few members,  so it would be cool if
everybody on the list would take a second and help out.  For a while now
Google, which has a whole lot of services, uses a system called captcha,
which requires someone to type the letters you see in a graphic to proove
you're a human being. I know we've seen this topic brought up here before.
Many people in the blind community have asked them to give us an alternative
method for signing up.  Some other services like Microsoft's msn, Yahoo! and
other sites like Live Journal provide audio
representations of the characters you type, and many people think Google
should provide the
same kind of alternative method for accessing their services, but to date,
they haven't. This is where everybody on the list can help. the website to
visit is

http://www.petitiononline.com/captcha

Simply go to the site, fill in your name, e-mail address and any comments
you'd like to send to google.  You don't need to actually leave any
comments, and your e-mail address will not be shown so there's no chance of
anything bad happening.  So visit

http://www.petitiononline.com/captcha

and sign your name to the petition.  The more people we have sign this
petition, the  better it will look to google.  Right now we have about 4300
signatures, but of course, for Google to take this matter even remotely
seriously, we need to have as many as we possibly can. It  only
takes a second, and hey, anything we can do to get rid of the captcha method
of
verification is ok with me!

Thanks,

John Esak

P.S. - If you have read The Google Story, you know how self-aggrandizing it
was. You know the  holier-than-thou attitude Google has about itself.  You
would think after making an obscene amount of profit, and pushing their
search engine up to the forefront, they would make their services accessible
to everyone. They should do this kind of thing without having to be prodded.
Just goes to show you that everyone, even those who think they are perfect,
are just greedy human beings after all... no matter how much they protest
that their only goal is the "good of mankind". :-(