Captcha accessibility

A blind friend of mine was commenting about how google finally added
accessibility support to it's captcha and I asked him if audio was the
preferred method of making it accessible. His reply:

I'm not aware of any other method for making it accessible.

I must say, though, that if everyone's systems were like Google's then I
wouldn't take as much issue with captcha. Paypal and others open a new
window for playing the audio, which means you're stuck remembering what
you've heard while switching back to the first window. Google's simply
plays and leaves you near the text field, though. They've also,
apparently, recorded people speaking the numbers with just enough
background noise to (probably) make it difficult for speech recognition,
but not enough to obscure the numbers. Contrast that to paypal, where I
always seemed to get the numbers wrong.

Anyhow, just a few constructive thoughts on the subject to go along with
lots of my negativity on it. Of course, this system does still exclude
deafblind users, and I'm not entirely sure how to address that.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Sr. Engineering Consultant      jnasby@pervasive.com
Pervasive Software      http://pervasive.com    work: 512-231-6117
vcard: http://jim.nasby.net/pervasive.vcf       cell: 512-569-9461