[gui-talk] Accessibility Problems With Another Major Retailer's Site

[Gerald Levy]

As long as I brought up the Target.com issue, I might as well relate the accessibility problem I recently encountered on the web site of another major retailer, Home Depot.  A few weeks ago, Home Depot had an item on sale that I wanted to purchase online.  So I visited their web site (which, unlike Target.com was readily accessible with IE 8).  Everything proceeded smoothly until I reached the last page to submit my order.  To my dismay, there was an image captcha on that page which had to be solved before the order could be submitted.  I have never encountered this on any other shopping site.  So I cancelled my order and started all over again using Firefox 3.6, figuring that I would use Webvisum to solve the offending captcha when I reached the order submission page.  But when I submitted the captcha to Wevvisum for decoding, Webvisum was unable to solve it successfully.  I tried over and over at least ten times with no success.  And of course, there was no audio captcha alternative on the page.  So I finally gave up in frustration and called Home Depot's customer support number.  I explained to the agent that I was blind and could not submit my online order myself because I could not solve the image captcha on the order submission page.  She was very helpful and cooperative and was able to complete and submit the order for me.  But what really bothers me about Home Depot's site is that if you have never shopped there before, you have no way of knowing in advance that you will encounter a captcha on the very last step of the order process, after you have already entered your address and credit card information. This means that if you want to cancel your order, they may still retain your sensitive credit card information on file, which makes me kind of uneasy.  And there is no way to preview the order submission page in advance to determine whether it contains a captcha unless you first go through all the steps of actually ordering something.  What a nasty surprise!  Has anyone else encountered this problem while shopping on the Home Depot site?

http://www.homedepot.com/


Gerald