Return Accessibility to Craigslist!

Craigslist is one of the most popular sites on the internet, offering categories in everything from jobs, to pets, to personals. It is used by millions of individuals and groups around the world for a wide variety of reasons. One of these groups is the blind and visually-impaired community. The introduction of CAPTCHA alienated this group from using many sites, since they offered no alternative to the visual code which screenreading software cannot read. Those which did provide audio did so in such poor quality, and with so many voices, that it was difficult for the listener to discern the code from the background noise. Craigslist has stood out in this regard, providing excellent quality audio, thereby making the blind users equal to the sited.

Recently, however, this has changed. The posting page itself is more difficult to navigate on a computer running Windows XP and it is completely impossible to post on a Macintosh running Leopard, because VoiceOver, the built-in screenreader, will not read the page properly once the first "continue" button is pressed. The quality of the audio has also dramatically decreased.

We the undersigned believe strongly in accessibility for all and ask that Craigslist return the high-quality audio to the CAPTCHA or provide a suitable alternative. Furthermore, we ask that the site may be made fully accessible once more for those running Macintosh computers. We thank you for reading our petition and hope that you will seriously consider our request.