I’ve just been looking round for a prospective client who wants an open blog on their site (I know… bad idea), but is bound under the UK DDA which prevents the use of inaccessible graphical captchas.
In the same week I’ve enabled limited graphical CAPTCHA’s on Phorum over on sendcard.org. The Akismet plugin was catching the spam well, but I was sick of deleting it manually (currently Phorum can’t delete it automatically). The Postgres mailing list has also been discussing using one for comments in their manual.
At some point common sense has to come into accessibility. I dislike CAPTCHAs (I have good eyesight yet often can’t read them), but they deter the spammer and save me a bit of work (unlike say Akismet, where the spammer keeps on spamming not knowing they’ve been caught, and I have to wade through confirming all are spam). Now which is better… a forum or comment system with a CAPTCHA, or no forum/comment system?
Some people propose asking a text-based question or problem, such as “What is the capital of France?” or “What is 7 times 3?”. There’s a few problems with these:
- These set up a barrier for dyslexic or dyspraxic people.
- For people who don’t speak English (or whatever language your website is in, they are difficult if not impossible.
- They require more effort than reading a list of characters! OK, so CAPTCHA’s are hard to read and require effort, but not mental work. I don’t want to drag my brain onto another topic after writing a post (and I have a physics degree, so it’s not like they’re impossible)
You must have seen the blogs that are disabling comments due to spam. Doing so makes the comments inaccessible to 100% of the people. I suggest that while being totally inclusive would be the best outcome, excluding 1% of people is preferable to excluding 100%.
Update: Jeff Croft wrote a rant on accessibility while I was finishing this, which is worth reading!
3 comments ↓
Hi arrived here via the post you reference at the end there.
I think the idea of asking posters a text-based question is rather good, especially if it’s a simple one (although yeah, define simple; it might be easy to underestimate the difficulty that simple geography-based questions will pose to some internet users). Perhaps questions like What is the third letter in the word music?, repeated for a couple of other words, would be preferable. Although I think any such barrier intended to stop spammers will also serve as a barrier to some users (users with certain cognitive problems for example), I would hope nevertheless that something more accessible than CAPTCHAs could be used. And in terms of any such checks that require user action, something text-based (and thus, unfortunately, potentially accessible and processable by spambots) has to be the answer.
Martin, that style of question is great. I still see it as having problems for people without a great grasp of English (not a problem for comments, but a problem for sendcard’s forum - I know of many foreign posters but none who have problems with the CAPTCHA - even before I added it) .
I’m going to give it a try on this weblog when I can find a plugin for it.
Thanks for the link! I’ll just say that I gave up on approving/denying messages Akismet catches. Now, I just trust Akismet. If it flags it as spam, I delete it automatically. No auto-moderation. No in between. Either you get on the site, or you don’t. Period.
Saves me the trouble of manually approving or denying comments, and I still get the benefit of Akismet. Sure, there are probably a few false positives. I can live with that.
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