FUCK YOU, GOOGLE!

[mathsnerd]

So I am wishful of obtaining a second Gmail account, since my mail email is used for communicating with family, and for a myriad of reasons, I am forced to be permanently invisible on chat, and that makes me sad. Also, I'd like an email address that doesn't use my legal name in the handle for my internet stuff. So, I go to the sign-up page and try my usual options (mathsnerd, mathsie), only to find that they're both taken. Okay, no problem. I start trying logical workarounds to see which ones are available.

Oh, wait, what's that, Google? After trying more than three names, I have to go through CAPTCHA to prove I'm a real person? Okay, that's kind of soon, but whatever. Gee, you sure scrunch those letters together and make them all wavy so that I have a real hard time figuring out what the hell you want me to enter...

Huh, okay, I've tried eight times, Google, and I can't seem to read it well enough that you're satisfied that I'm a real person. And while you offer a "read-aloud" accessibility option for the CAPTCHA down below for submitting the form (which, incidentally, doesn't work in Chrome, yeah, you know, YOUR BROWSER!), for the CAPTCHA to keep trying different handles you conveniently don't offer any alternate options.

So, in conclusion, FUCK YOU, GOOGLE, AND FUCK YOUR UTTER LACK OF ACCESSIBILITY ON THIS PAGE. You should be ashamed of yourselves. Right now you're not living up to your usual standards. And I'm seriously wondering why I bother with Gmail accounts.

No love and a fuck-load of frustration,
mathsnerd

Comments

[meloukhia]

I've got some emails out--I'd like to get contact info for someone who works on accessibility stuff. I'm thinking about a well crafted post to point folks at, and a polite email campaign (said post could include an email template, even!).

One person who might be good to keep in mind is Ken Harrenstien, the Deaf engineer who helped design automatic captioning for YouTube. I'm also in the Bay Area, so if we could organise a campaign that resulted in, like, an actual meeting with a Google person, I might be able to represent...