WebVisum is a unique and free Firefox add on which greatly enhances web accessibility and empowers the blind and visually impaired community by putting the control in your hands! Its aim is to allow you to better enjoy surfing the net and be significantly less dependent upon outside help.
Just a few exciting features that we already offer: * Community driven tagging and page enhancements. * Automated and instant CAPTCHA image solving, sign up to web sites and make posts and comments without asking for help! * Built in helper functions for easier page navigation and less confusion. * Numerous under the hood page tweaks designed to help screen reader users. * Visually Impaired users benefit from features such as high contrast page viewing, link and focus highlighting, and more.
We have an extensive list of exciting features and enhancements and are planning to continue developing this product further to its fullest potential. In order to accomplish these goals we need to reach the entire blind and visually impaired Internet users community and we need your help in spreading the word!
We rely on your feedback alone to improve on what we have done so far and make WebVisum the ultimate accessibility helper for the web. So please do not hesitate to write to us through the contact form on the site, any feedback, comment or question you may have.
> 'Automated and instant CAPTCHA image solving, sign up to web sites > and make posts and comments without asking for help!
> Wow that will excite the bot writers ;-)
Yes, I blinked at the above quoted paragraph as well. While I didn't test this yet, I see it from a reversed perspective: IMO, an automated CAPTCHA solver library would have been the first thing that we should have released and maintained as soon as this extra silly idea of CAPTCHA was born on the Internet in the first place.
I've been blocked out of certain sites since CAPTCHA was first used too often now, it has cost me a lot of time, and not only me, I also had to consume the valueable time of sighted coworkers and friends to help me through the excluding CAPTCHA jungle. And in some cases it was even worse, the idea of CAPTCHAs led people like thomann.de to redesign their site so that all product prices are now just displayed as images. They officially claim this is done to avoid automated price comparison. In the end, it doesnt matter why they claim they do it, the result is what matters, that a site that was perfectly usable before is now mostly unusable.
A publicly available CAPTCHA solver would demonstrate to people that CAPTCHA is broken per design. In fact, best would be a CAPTCHA-solving proxy so that it could be offered as a web service. I was pissed enough by the move of thomann.de to write a public proxy with a little bit of OCR that would rewrite their site to some usable form again, but then I just decided to stop making bussiness with them, instead of investing any further time. This is OK, but still sucks since thomann.de was the best music internet shop that I know in my area...
I despise CAPTCHAs, and every argument you might want to bring forward in support of them, please save yourself the time and dont, they are all very flawed. CAPTCHA is the most problematic thing since images without alt tags.
Anyway, I think that we shouldn't see CAPTCHA as a feature, as in, oh, it help so much to defend ourselves from bots. You should see it as it is, oh, it helps so much to keep blind people away from us.
Steve, CAPTCHAs are annoying, imperfect and unfortunately a sad reality we have to live with, at least for now.
While our extension (and server) does provide the capability of solving CAPTCHAs for individuals, anyone trying to use us in an automated manner will learn that they cannot do so quite as easily and that they would be better of getting their own CAPTCHA solving monkeys. We've taken steps to detect and prevent any abuse from occurring, automatically.
We share all of your concerns, we've thought it through and decided that we can handle this safely and provide a great service to the blind and visually impaired communities.
Mario, Clearly the people operating the site you mentioned are lacking on technical skills to implement some proper anti bot protection. Showing prices in images is obviously not the right way to handle bots scraping away freely at your site. Unless the price images are obfuscated like CAPTCHAs are -- which I doubt, they would be as easy to scrape as plain text, with a decent OCR library, especially as they need to be readable to humans. My thinking is that these guys are plain lame for doing it that way - send them to us and we'll teach them how to do it right. :)
If you have any questions or concerns, don't hesitate to ask here or through the contact us form on the site.
I think the best service to us all would be to free the web of all captchas, for ever :-)
I hate them, and I can can usually see them (I say usually because a few have beaten me, perhaps due to age deterioration of sight). I wonder how many sites just plonk them on coz other sites have them?
Without wanting starting a flame war which has little place here I agree with Mario they are the biggest problem since missing alt attrib, but worse as they break site for everyone.
IMHO they area misplace solution to the problem of spam bots. Filters like bad behaviour seem a better placed solution.
Also IMHO if you put something on the web is is public for all to use, people and bots. RSS would be broke if this was not true (and so will the semantic web). Obviously bad bots doing DoS is a problem that needs a defence. (as with RSS being hit by bad readers).
So if your solver works reliable it's sounds interesting as perhaps an inevitable step as I guess all turning tests will eventually be cracked by technology. so how do you do it?
-- Steve Lee -- Open Source Assistive Technology Software web: fullmeasure.co.uk blog: eduspaces.net/stevelee/weblog
I apologize, but I need to put my skeptic hat on for a moment. I took a look at the website, and I'm still left with an unanswered question, and maybe I just missed it, but who are you? Maybe it's just me, but I become a little suspicious when anonymous people ask me to install something on my machine.
Perhaps you can introduce yourself and/or your company and provide us with some background information?
Thomas, We'll post who we are in the very near future. This is not an excuse, but we had to concentrate more on the extension and server powering it than on the site and so it's even lacking a proper how to document right now. Our resources are for now limited.
WebVisum being a Firefox extension, is open by nature, it is written in readable Javascript. We urge you to review the source and send any bugs our way!
Steve, CAPTCHAs are evil, no doubt about that. You've brought up a great topic though, the missing alt tag! We solve that too - though a community effort. Everyone can give the right tag to any link, image, or other important page elements such as form fields. Once a tag has been set, anyone using the extension and going to the same site and page will automatically have this tag as well, they can make corrections to the tag, add more tags, etc. You're encouraged to check out what we do for yourself.
> You've brought up a great > topic though, the missing alt tag! We solve that too - though a > community effort. Everyone can give the right tag to any link, image, > or other important page elements such as form fields. Once a tag has > been set, anyone using the extension and going to the same site and > page will automatically have this tag as well, they can make > corrections to the tag, add more tags, etc.
That's interesting. What if the image is inside a link. Will it look at the title of the page being pointed to and use that?
On Jul 2, 4:25 pm, Aaron Leventhal <aaronlevent...@moonset.net> wrote:
> > You've brought up a great > > topic though, the missing alt tag! We solve that too - though a > > community effort. Everyone can give the right tag to any link, image, > > or other important page elements such as form fields. Once a tag has > > been set, anyone using the extension and going to the same site and > > page will automatically have this tag as well, they can make > > corrections to the tag, add more tags, etc.
> That's interesting. What if the image is inside a link. Will it look at > the title of the page being pointed to and use that?
> - Aaron
Hi Aaron,
If you mean that the extension would look at the title of the page a link points to then no, it would not. However, we can do that but I'm not sure it would produce a great result though as many pages have non descriptive titles.
What we do instead is have the user follow the link, even if he does not know what page it points to, then, either by the page title or by the page content the user figures out the purpose of the page, he then hits a hotkey and labels the link that he followed to get to the new page. ("Label last visited link" CTRL+7 by default), it's a comfort feature -- the user does not have to go back, find the link again and label it. As soon as he's done with the page and labeled it (he can also set a new page title for it, by the way) he goes back to the previous page and finds the link labeled, he can continue with the rest of the links.
We will soon write a proper how to clarifying this and explaining about each and every feature and how to potentially use it, in detail.
How about letting the user query for the title pointed to without visiting the whole page? If the title is good, they can use another command to assign it as the alt text and everyone benefits.
webvi...@googlemail.com wrote: > On Jul 2, 4:25 pm, Aaron Leventhal<aaronlevent...@moonset.net> wrote: >>> You've brought up a great >>> topic though, the missing alt tag! We solve that too - though a >>> community effort. Everyone can give the right tag to any link, image, >>> or other important page elements such as form fields. Once a tag has >>> been set, anyone using the extension and going to the same site and >>> page will automatically have this tag as well, they can make >>> corrections to the tag, add more tags, etc. >> That's interesting. What if the image is inside a link. Will it look at >> the title of the page being pointed to and use that?
>> - Aaron
> Hi Aaron,
> If you mean that the extension would look at the title of the page a > link points to then no, it would not. However, we can do that but I'm > not sure it would produce a great result though as many pages have non > descriptive titles.
> What we do instead is have the user follow the link, even if he does > not know what page it points to, then, either by the page title or by > the page content the user figures out the purpose of the page, he then > hits a hotkey and labels the link that he followed to get to the new > page. ("Label last visited link" CTRL+7 by default), it's a comfort > feature -- the user does not have to go back, find the link again and > label it. As soon as he's done with the page and labeled it (he can > also set a new page title for it, by the way) he goes back to the > previous page and finds the link labeled, he can continue with the > rest of the links.
> We will soon write a proper how to clarifying this and explaining > about each and every feature and how to potentially use it, in detail.
Love your suggestions so far Aaron. We'll implement them in one way or the other.
For anyone who cares, in the next few hours we'll be posting an FAQ, a privacy policy derived from wikipedia's privacy policy, an about us page as well as a testimonials page listing some of the reviews we already got.
