The Kyle File

Who would go to a crowded room and pay to listen to a CD one time? You can’t pause the CD if you have to go to the bathroom or get a snack, and you can’t put your favorite song on repeat if you want. You just go in there and pay $5 to listen, and when it’s over, it’s over, and you go home disappointed because you wasted $5 on something you could have heard at home, and chances are you also wasted money on snacks and drinks that you could have bought elsewhere for a quarter of what you paid for them.

Here’s the really crazy part: many people do this all the time, but instead of going to a crowded room and paying money to listen to a CD only once, they go to a crowded room and pay to watch a DVD only once. They can’t pause the DVD if they have to go to the bathroom or get a snack, and they spend way more than they need to for the snacks and drinks they get while they’re there. Worse still is the fact that the average movie ticket itself costs about a third of the price they could pay to buy the DVD, take it home, watch it as many times as they want and have full control over when it’s played, paused, or stopped. And then there’s the problem of having to buy a single ticket for each person who wants to watch the movie. By the time it’s all over, they have probably spent more than twice the cost of the DVD.

So no, I don’t go to a movie theater, and probably never will, not because I’m blind, after all, I do watch TV and DVD’s, but because the point of wasting my money on something so ridiculous escapes me. And before anyone mentions the fact that movies are released into the theater before you can buy the DVD, I would point out that TV should be used for that purpose, just as radio is used to let people hear songs before a CD drops. In addition, I would also say just go ahead and release the stuff already. If a movie is complete enough to watch in a theater, most likely the DVD is completed, and if songs from a CD are being played on the radio, most likely, the CD is completed. Stop sitting on stuff for 3 to 6 months wondering if people will pay to see or hear it. Just release it already and see what happens. Hype is greatly overrated, and I personally don’t fall for it.

In honor of Start Your Own Country Day, I hereby declare the nation of Kyle. Long live King Kyle!

Amazon Mechanical Turk is an open marketplace where businesses and individuals can offer payment for tasks to be done by large groups of people. These tasks are usually more suited to human beings than computers, and are distributed among a large group of people, similar to the way complex computational problems are broken down and distributed among large groups of computers. The available tasks include things such as judging the relevance of search results, separating the events that occur in a sentence and completing short surveys about behavior or perception of products or services. If your work is approved, your earnings are transferred within a couple of days to your Amazon Payments account, which is similar in a lot of ways to PayPal, and can be withdrawn to your bank account or an Amazon gift certificate at any time. Completing these tasks can be a lot of fun and is an easy way to make a little extra cash when you need it. But if you live with blindness or visual impairment, you will quickly run into an image only captcha that you will need to verify repeatedly, usually once or twice a day. Currently, the only way around this is to submit the image to either the WebVisum Firefox plugin or to Solona each time it is presented.

Yesterday I e-mailed their customer support to express the need for an alternative to their image only captcha verification that is accessible to people living with visual impairment. Here is the e-mail I sent in its entirety. Note that the word HIT as it appears in this email stands for Human Intelligence Task.

Once I complete a certain number of HITs, I am asked to type a word that is printed in an image in order to accept the next HIT. Because of my visual impairment, it is very hard to continue from this point. Because there is no audio or other alternative to the visual image, I am forced to send a copy of the image to a server that sends it to a person who can see to read it. The person who reads it sends back the text to be copied and pasted into the word verification text box. This is unduly time consuming, and on Mechanical Turk, time is indeed money. In the past, I have been able to independently solve audio captchas as well as text-based questions based on math and common sense answers. Please implement such an alternative or a mobile phone based or other opt-out method for the Mechanical Turk site.

Thanks, ~Kyle

This morning I received a response from their customer service department, which I am also including here. Some links have been removed for security.

Hello,

Thank you very much for your feedback. While the Amazon.com and its related websites are generally usable for people with screen readers, we’re always looking for ways to improve usability of the site for all customers, including those with disabilities. To that end, Amazon has formed an alliance with the National Federation of the Blind to work together to improve the accessibility of our websites in the coming months and years.

At this time, the Mechanical Turk website is in “Beta” and does not yet support a non-captcha security verification solution. However, we appreciate your feedback on how we can continue to improve the site, and I’m forwarding your feedback to the team responsible for website accessibility.

If you have any other questions or concerns, please feel free to contact us back using the secure form at the following specialized link to ensure we receive your next message:

(link removed)

Thank you for your interest in Mechanical Turk.

Did I solve your problem?

If yes, please click here: (link removed)

If no, please click here: (link removed)

Please note: this e-mail was sent from an address that cannot accept incoming e-mail.

To contact us about an unrelated issue, please visit the Help section of our web site.

Best regards,

Stacy B. Amazon Mechanical Turk

Based on this response, and considering Amazon’s dedication to accessibility on their other sites, it looks promising that the accessibility of the web site, especially the problematic captchas, can and will be fixed in a timely manner. However, it would be greatly beneficial for their team to understand just how many people wish to see better accessibility on this particular Amazon service which is still in public beta at this time.

If you are at all interested in using Amazon Mechanical Turk, or even if you’re not interested in this site, but you benefit from or advocate for general accessibility of web sites to people living with visual impairment, I would urge you to individually contact their customer service department. Feel free to copy and paste any part of my above e-mail or write your own. Also, please share and link to this post and invite as many other people as possible to do the same. Accessibility should be the foremost consideration whenever building a web site or an application. In 2010, there is no longer a reason to make it an afterthought.

Customer Service"

They even gave me a big party and lots of cool stuff. LOL. Fenwal, Inc. Blood Donor Hall of Fame I really can't stress enough the importance of giving blood and blood products. Your small sacrifice really does save lives. Call the American Red Cross or your local blood collection center to schedule an appointment to donate blood, platelets or plasma and give the gift of life. You can make a difference.