I am always excited when others talk about Kurzweil. Kathleen posted Kurzweil's website which is a text to speech program. This program was purchased by our school system and is one we use often in our Career Technical Education Dept. We use Kurzweil for our students who receive modifications such as read alouds. We also use this program for our VoCATS testing, which allows students to receive necessary modification and they can take the test at their own pace.

This video is has a link in the article below, but decided to bookmark it separate for easier access. This video shows how screen reader interprets CAPTCHA for the blind.

In several recent online and offline discussions on comment spam and other automated, improper use of forms, I have seen or heard people suggest using image-based CAPTCHAs (you know, those images of distorted letters and numbers) to prevent spambots and other programs from successfully submitting forms. Requiring the user to interpret an image of distorted characters and then enter those characters into a text input field may seem like a nice idea at first. Deciphering those characters for verification can be confusing for most of us, but for the blind who depend on screen readers, it is impossible for those programs to intrepret such mumbo jumbo.