Now, of course, you will say, these days there are audio CAPTCHAs. However, this is what I tried to use on twitter.com. They tell me they are looking for two words I am supposed to enter, and I am also supposed to not worry, the best guess is OK. As mentioned above, I tried this seven times. With some attempts, I didn't understand a single word at all, with other attempts, I understood way more than two words. It was never marked clearly which of the excess words are supposed to be ignored. No matter what I entered, I apparently failed to solve the CAPTCHA and proof my humanity.

And I am even lucky, I tend to think of myself as someone that does understand english quite well when listening to it, a ability that not everyone has in my country that has german as its primary language. Supposing that twitter is an international service and not really linked to english as a primary communication language, the audio CAPTCHA is also excluding all the people that do not speak/hear english very well. Besides, this point doesnt matter, because I bet you can't solve that CAPTCHA on first try even if you are a native speaker, its just too damn crazy.

So, what to do? I have no idea. I guess my frustration will just grow boundlessly. CAPTCHAs are the first events in IT that make me think about my ability to do this job in the future. If these trends persists, I dunno how I am supposed to take part in the Internet in the future.

FreeDots

BRLTTY recently gained the ability to dynamically reconfigure the amount of status cells being used (for those displays that have no fixed status cells). As I use a 88-cell braille display, this opened up the ability (to name one example) to use a slightly wider text terminal configuration. But how to achieve this?

On Linux, we have the so-called framebuffer console. All we need to do is to load a framebuffer kernel module (use the one that most closely suites your card) and use the program fbset to configure a certain screen dimension. In our case, as we'd like to use slightly more than 80 characters, we are settling for 1024x768. There is a font (in the console-terminus package on Debian GNU/Linux systems) which is 12 pixel wide (12x24). 1024 divided by 12 equals to 85 (and a few pixels on the side that we are not going to miss).

Additionally, we will have to configure our system to permanently load this font. You can do this in /etc/kbd/config:

CONSOLE_FONT="Lat15-Terminus24x12"

Voila. How to use fbset to configure 1024x768 and how to make this permanent is left as an exercise for the reader.

Here is a list of the shortcuts I found very valuable as a blind eclipse user:

• Alt+Shift+Q P: Jumps to "Package explorer", very useful if you want to navigate to an editor window showing a particular class.
• Alt+Shift+X J: Run your application.
• Alt+Shift+Q X: Shows the Problems view. You invoke this after building and/or running your app. The view contains a Tree of errors and warnings, expand the collapsed items to see the actual erorrs/warnings. Hitting return/enter on a error/warning jumps to the location in an editor window and highlights the problematic problematic expression (see next item)..
• Ctrl+1: Quick Fix. If a problematic expression was highlighted this gives you a list of things you can automatically do about it to fix it. Once you press Ctrl+1 this window doesn't have focus, so you need to hit TAB once immediately after Ctrl+1 to see the choices. Select one by hitting return and the magic takes place.
• Ctrl+SPACE: Complete a method while typing. This has the same problem as quick fix, the popup window doesn't get focus automatically, just hit TAB to get around this problem.
• Alt+Shift+Q C: Go to console output window. I usually do this after running my app to check if there was any unexpected output.
• Ctrl+F6: Switch to next editor window. Sometimes, Eclipse looses focus and you end up in nowhere land. Either F10 followed by escape or Ctrl+F6 helps a lot here.

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Debian based and uses the latest stable releases of accessibility software like AT-SPI (2.24.0) and Orca 2.24.0.>

The first who finds the easter-egg (not really hidden at all) and reports it via e-Mail will be mentioned in my next posting :-).

KNFB Reader

"Insert disk and press a key to continue"

OCRopus(tm)

Leider hatten wir mit unserer alten Website das Problem, dass unsere Preise regelmäßig von unseren Mitbewerbern mit sogenannten Spider-Programmen automatisch ausgelesen wurde und wenn wir mal irgendwo zu billig waren, hagelte es Proteste seitens der Lieferanten. Dies ging soweit, dass wichtige Einkäufer den halben Tag nur noch mit Preisdiskussionen beschäftigt waren und es teilweise zu unvorgesehenen "Lieferengpässen" kam. Da wir unseren Kunden weiterhin den bestmöglichen Preis anbieten möchten, haben wir uns deshalb entschlossen, die Preise auf unserer Website als Graphik anzuzeigen, damit sie nicht mehr automatisch ausgelesen werden können.

http://delYsid.org/thomann.pl.

planet-a11y.net

simple source code I developed to produce these pages (including RSS feed, of course).> Source Code, der zur Erzeugung dieser Seiten (inklusive RSS Feed natürlich) verwendet wird, lesen.>