Captcha 508 Compliance

Recently when I was creating a contact us web page, I ran into an issue with 508 compliance. Generally, to make a site 508 compliant you have to sacrifice certain functionality to achieve this goal. However there is one area where this functionality cannot be sacrificed and this is in the use of a Captcha. Captchas are absolutely necessary when creating a website that allows user to submit comments, questions, or payments.  However in general captcha's are very difficult to read even if you have 20/20 vision, are sometimes impossible to read for the color blind, and are obviously impossible for the blind using readers to understand. .

Now there are many types of captchas some that ask simple questions and others that ask you to pick the correct image, but this still does not address the issue for the blind. So after doing some searching around I found an open source captcha plugin that allows you to use it as your captcha but the nice thing is that it also has a sound component that supports four languages and can read off any code you provide it. After hacking out the sound component out and integrating it with the captcha being used for the site, it worked beautifully. The example provided in the source made it easy to understand how to use it and how to integrate it with my own captcha. I highly suggest it if you are looking for a sound component for a letter/number based captcha. I am sure there are other good solutions out there  for captchas with sound but this definitely suited my needs.  http://www.titude.nl/scripts/demo/captcha/

**Corporate Technology Solutions Inc. (CTS) Is a premier technology provider to the financial services and health care industries in addition to working closely with many nonprofit companies.  CTS is dedicated to ensuring the accessibility of its products.