What $18 Million of Your Tax Money Gets You

This one comes to you courtesy of care of No Agenda. I’m sure everybody has heard of the government’s website for “tracking money” use in the “recovery effort.” If you haven’t you should have since $18 million of your tax money went to make it. Well either way part of the mandate for the site was that it needed to be accessible by the blind. That brings us to the complain form.

In order to submit a complaint you need to enter a capta. This is pretty standard and is mostly used to prevent spam bots from posting on a web site. Well blind people can’t use them as they can’t see the words so there is often an audio version of the capta for accessibility reasons. Click on the audio version link in the capta box on recovery.gov. Now try to decipher what is being said in those audio clips. Do you think you could understand what is being said and type it all into the box accurately? Didn’t think so.

Technically it’s recapta that is the problem here as recovery.gov is using that. But for $18 million you would think they could have come up with their own spam control system that blind people could use. Seriously funny and sad at the same time.