I have also tried to use the spoken letters from Microsoft for another
purpose - signing up for a "passport".  I gave up after the first
trial.  The reason  that this problem arises is to keep spammers from
jamming everybody's account with junk mail, so we all have to sympathize
with the problem that is being solved here.  The background noise is
deliberate, because it would defeat the purpose if the spoken message was
so clear that speech recognition could pick it up and translate it correctly.

I was in a Microsoft-hosted meeting with a lot of access technologists
recently, and Microsoft was looking to us for a better solution.  This
group of "experts" couldn't come up with any idea better than having a
phone number to call.  There must be some clever way that blind people can
be given enough information to sign up, but that's easier to say than to
do.  If anybody on the list does have a really good solution, I'll forward
it to Microsoft.  And I'll all but guarantee that they'll adopt it if it
really does solve the problem for blind people without permitting a
computer program to access it automatically and flood Hotmail with zillions
of spam-generating accounts.  Given a choice, I'll take the minor bother of
calling a phone number in preference to multiplying the spam that floods my
e-mail.

John


At 10:20 PM 7/24/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>Hello
>
>While attempting to set up a Hotmail account, I got to a point where you
>need to type in characters that appear in a picture. What is nice is that
>they have an option for you to click on a link if you can't see the
>picture. The idea is that you click on a wav file which contains the
>spoken characters that you need to type in. In theory that is great, but
>in practice, listening to the file is an exercise in frustration, as there
>is so much background noise, that you can't distinguish, for example a "b"
>from a "p."  Moreover, the speed at which the woman read-out the
>characters made it necessary to replay the file more than once. I tried
>at least ten times with no luck. Every
>time I typed in what I thought I heard as the character string, it was
>wrong.
>Has anyone else experienced this new kink in Hotmail?
>
>While MicroSoft should be applauded for taking a different approach than
>Yahoo (where you need to call in to get the characters that are embedded
>in a picture), was
>this fully tested for its practicality?
>
>Jennison
>
>-----------------------
>Check out the EASI web:
>http://www.rit.edu/~easi
>Check EASI Courses and Clinics
>To sign off this list
>send e-mail to [log in to unmask] saying
>signoff easi

John Gardner
Professor and Director, Science Access Project
Department of Physics
Oregon State University
Corvallis, OR 97331-6507
tel: (541) 737 3278
FAX: (541) 737 1683
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
URL: http://dots.physics.orst.edu

-----------------------
Check out the EASI web:
http://www.rit.edu/~easi
Check EASI Courses and Clinics
To sign off this list
send e-mail to [log in to unmask] saying
signoff easi