Hi, this is my first post.

I would have been making use of your site for some time and would have registered and posted ages ago had it not been for the fact that your site poses a barrier to visually impaired people.

You see, I use a screen reader program with speech output. This is unable to read those screen capture things which require the user to type in a code that appears as an image.

Some sites, such as Microsoft Hotmail, allow you to listen to an audio version of the code, whilst others like Yahoo provide a means of making contact for visually impaired customers to register.

At the weekend, I finally remembered, when I had somebody sighted visiting me, to ask them to assist me registering with this Discussion Forum.

However, I am still unable to use the "Contact Us" facility to report number inaccuracies to you as this still requires me to type in a code, even when I am logged into the Discussion Forum.

I appreciate the need for this system to stop automated bots from registering multiple accounts. I also appreciate you are a small organisation run not-for-profit, but please could you investigate, as a matter of urgency, an alternative method for people like myself to register for the forum and to be able to use the contact facility.

Keeping this barrier in place is in breach of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995. It may be something that YaBB need to address.

Please do everything you can - I really love your site and am keen to participate.

Thanks.

# Edited to aid readability ~ DaveM

It is unfortunate that there is not more integration between the main site and forum, such that a user logged into the forum (and suitably authorised to use the site - say after an enrolment period) can't post numbers without having to fill in the captcha. Looking at the latest version of the forum software (YaBB) it appears that they don't support audio captchas yet.

I'm not quite sure how the Disability Discrimination Act links to websites, but I can understand that the issues you raise may have put off other contributors. I'll send the forum admin a note to alert him to this thread and see if he wants to make a more formal response.