When you sign up for a Youtube account, you have to enter the characters depicted in one of those oddly distorted images. There's an out for those who can't perform that task for whatever reason. The link to that secondary option, right below the image, is marked: "Can't Read?"
Trackback URL: http://thinklings.org/bloo.trackback.php/4161.
Then again, the idea of a visually impaired person checking out YouTube videos is a head scratcher. :-)
Actually I have several friends that are unsighted. And believe it or not many of them do go to movies. It is surpising the things these frinds can pick up from the nuance of speach. A "movie" is after all a story. And the visually impaired are there to "see" the story.
Of course, we could get into the question of: "Legally Blind". But that would open a can of worms that I am not sure Alan was intent on addressing.
I remember reading the purpose of the "varification code"---as it is called---is to twhart the prolification of spammers. Apparently, it throws a wrench in the works for the bots that spammers use.
At any rate, it is a head scratcher. The spambots are continually improved so as to be....well, sort of like a "chess engine". The good chess engine is not subject to overlooking anything that has been programed into it's memory: A thing that I find all humans are subject to doing.
Did you click on it? It's not an out. It actually only changes the background in case it was distorting the characters beyond recognition. You can click it several times for several changes of background. But the characters don't change and it doesn't get you around that step. I don't know if this info helps the discussion any, but I thought I'd throw it in just in case.
I think that's for the visually impaired who have a program that reads text for them. Those programs generally can't read those distorted images, but they would be able to read the "Can't read?" thing and allow their users to click that option.