Ed,

Many of these sites are putting in a captia, which is a distorted picture of 
random characters.  The purpose is to keep automatic spammer bots from 
subscribing to the service and either mining e-mail address from lists that 
the website hosts, or tying up its mailserver with junk e-mail.

Since you need to be sighted to see this garbled picture and enter it into 
the appropriate box, a captia is inaccessible to those of us with screen 
readers.

One work around is an audio link.  You press this, and it will read a series 
of characters that you must enter.  The audio itself is somewhat distorted 
so that a person may need to listen with headphones.  Again, the distortion 
is added to inhibit voice or speech recognition being used by the nasties 
(read spammers).

Again, not a perfect solution, but workable for all except the deaf-blind.

Steve, K8SP
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ed Malmgren" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, October 01, 2006 11:46 PM
Subject: Re: another qrz.com question


> Would someone please explain what an audio link is and how it works.
> Thanks.  Ed K7UC
>