Tuesday, May 2, 2006

Captchas for the visually impaired

I haven't enabled captchas on my blog, partly because I think they're annoying, partly because I really haven't had trouble with spam comments that I know of (I must not be popular ;_;), and partly because the Blogger captchas weren't accessible to the visually impaired--if you can't see, and your browser can't read the captcha to you (which is kind of the whole point of captchas, not being machine-readable), then you can't post a comment.

I'm pleased to say that the last issue has been resolved.




Good for Blogger!

Sushicam has an interesting captcha system: instead of being some weird warped letter-number combination that you have to read and type in, it's a math problem. I thought that was a unique solution, though I wonder how long it will take for spam proggies to be programmed to pick out the numbers and the math terms and figure out what the answer should be.

3 comments:

Claire said...

I just noticed that earlier today. Pretty cool.

Anonymous said...

Why don`t you move to wordpress? You have the domain name already so it shouldn`t be too much of a problem.

The akismet spam plugin deals with any spam comments you get effortlessly.

Heather Meadows said...

Well, just because someone has a domain doesn't mean they have the server requirements.

It happens that I do, and I've been talking about switching to WordPress for like...two years now. Something ridiculous. I'm just not happy with the template I designed yet, and I haven't had time to tweak it in ages.