Again I say, this issue was first reported on Feb 3 2006, and we still have no way for blind people to create an account on Wikipedia. There is no WMF employee or consultant who has been assigned the job of fixing this, nor is there any budget or deadline. What we have been doing for the last 18 years is clearly not working.

A quote from journalist Shira Ovide:

In T6845#7593870, @kostajh wrote:

...perhaps their respective product/engineering management folks could...

Because WMF management not only refuses to assign a developer with a budget and a deadline to fixing this but refuses to discuss it, we are left with Yet Another Volunteer Willing To Work On This.

In T6845#7091225, @Aklapper wrote:

@Guy_Macon: I asked you to add constructive comments. See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bug_management/Phabricator_etiquette for guidance. Thanks.

In T297538#7564758, @Legoktm wrote:

In T297538#7564727, @Guy_Macon wrote:

Some other users are trying to get such a notice; If someone sends another mass message that goes to my talk page I will report whether it happens again, and this time will grab a screen shot if it does.

Done.

In T297538#7564533, @Xaosflux wrote:

@Guy_Macon Would you please go to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Notifications and grab a screen shot of the notification related to this report, then paste it here?

In T297538#7564449, @Legoktm wrote:

Is there an example of this notification? This certainly wasn't the original behavior, something must've changed in Notifications...

I do not think that it is possible for anyone to be more " interested in bringing this ticket forward" than I have been.

In T6845#7089749, @DrMel wrote:

Newbie Hackathon Qs: Could someone here let me/us know:

who are the current admins/decision makers for proposed changes to the main account creation pages?

and/or
What’s the process for proposing changes?

I formally object to Aklapper removing my comments as being "off topic". The fact that the WMF has spend 13 years not fixing this problem and that we are coming up on 14 years seems to be very much on topic. I don't see any link for accessing the edit history, so could someone please send me an email with my comments here and a record of when they were removed and by who?

Re: "About potential backlash on disabling CAPTCHAs: Here stewards are arguing for better CAPTCHAs here because they have too many fake accounts they need to deal with", that's why I am not asking that CAPTCHAs be disabled. Instead I am asking that the WMF

• Assign an employee or contractor the task of fixing this problem.
• Budget some amount of money towards fixing this.
• Give us at least the start of a schedule with a rough estimate of how long it is expected to take to fix this.
• Write some sort of requirements -- however informal -- defining "done".

Re: discussing solutions on this page, we have been doing that FOR THIRTEEN YEARS and blind people are still unable to access Wikipedia.

I am having a bit of a quandary here.

I just posted the following to [ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Foundation_Board_of_Trustees ]:

Re: "when you wrote "all our HTML is served with gzip compression", did you mean that everything uses gzip compression, or like Guy writes above, is it only pages above a certain size?":

Sorry for not responding. So far I have not been able to get anyone at the WMF who has the ability to make this change to discuss the merits of doing this. A developer working on page weight could do a quick test in less than five minutes that will answer the gzip question using the actual Wikipedia environment. Instead, I am being asked by people who have zero ability to actually make the change to (imperfectly) duplicate Wikipedia and do my own tests, and of course if I do that I will be then be told that I have not duplicated the Wikipedia environment correctly (and they would be correct). Plus, due to the overhead and latency of compression and decompression, websites typically only gzip files above a certain size threshold, so I would also have to figure out the minimum size at which Wikipedia stops compressing, estimate how many pages are below that (redirects are tiny), and in the end I still will have utterly failed to open up a discussion with an actual developer who has at least the potential of running a real-world test of my proposal.

I am working on setting up a procedure (using Slackware or windows 10) that will allow me to efficiently measure the result after gzip compression. See [ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_%28technical%29#Wikipedia.27s_HTTP_compression ]. More later when I have some actual numbers. --Guy Macon

In the HTML that Wikipedia sends to the browser, every line sent to the browser has a DOS-style carriage return and line feed (OD OA) as a line ending.