24 Hours Later…
Ap
Adam | 17 Jan 2007 | 0 Comments | Share this...
In a comment on my post about the death of the message board due to spam attacks, we got an offer for software which would allow our site to use a “bot” to post inordinate amounts of spam on other sites. Needless to say, I passed. I also enabled those annoying little “type the word in the image” things on all the comment forms.
***Science side note: they are called CAPTCHAs, which apparently stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.” More on Turing tests on wikipedia.***
Aside from the fact that they are not foolproof, there are two main drawbacks to these. The first is that they are annoying and can slow down the commenting submission. I apologize, but we’re all going to have to live with that. The second is that they are not compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. When the blind use the Web, they use a special screen reader that reads all the information to them as they tab through the page. Unfortunately, it is not possible for the screen reader to read an image. When I build a site, I try to make them ADA compliant to the best of my ability. Therefore, until I find a better solution, if there is anyone who we’re keeping from participating in the site, please , and I’ll find a way to turn off the CAPTCHA system for you.
