At Blogsome they are deaf, not blind

Three weeks ago, we wrote about Captchas, those barriers to site accessibility, preventing blind or visually impaired users from accessing a protected resource. But not only. These captchas also create barriers for the much larger number of people with learning disabilities involving text recognition (the visual perceptual problems often casually referred to as “dyslexia“). A reader of ours asked Blogsome: how can I disable visual captchas, allowing my visually impaired readers to comment on my Blogsome site? This was the answer. That is, the answer was: “Is there anybody blind, out there? Well, that is not our problem, sorry guys“. This is not the answer, dear Blogsome admin.

Are you a blogger, concerned about accessibility? If you are on Wordpress, you can use the excellent Akismet plugin. You can complement it with some other antispam plugin, like Wordverify by Chris Wage, a plugin to allow for comment submission verification based on a configurable “codeword”. WordVerify provides a simpler alternative to the visual captcha method, by just requiring the entry of a single word but, most of all, it provides antispam protection without harming accessibility. Further, WordVerify allows customization of the phrase in which the security word is presented in the form, decreasing the ability of spammers to scrape the word if the plugin gains widespread usage. Dear bloggers, if you really cares about accessibility, don’t imitate Blogsome. If you are on Blogsome, you can consider to move to Wordpress.com. It’s the original, it’s antispam committed, it’s accessible and, last but not least, it’s not operated by an arrogant staff.

P.S. Today, we discovered that Digg is also using visual captchas, preventing visually impaired people from submitting post. We hope Digg will become accessible, sooner or later.

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