From: Ben Giddings <bg-rubytalk@...>
Date: 2004-11-12T01:55:24+09:00
Subject: Re: A Wiki/Spam Report

Jim Weirich wrote:
> This is known as a Captcha test (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captcha). As
> mentioned earlier, I think most of the simple minded bots have been
> eliminated, and the remaining spammers are either human or bots closely
> monitored by humans.  I suspect that captcha will have less of an effect
> than we would hope.  Of course I could be wrong and may setup a test of
> this.  Also, as someone else noted, captcha systems suffer from some
> concern  over accessibility issues.

I always hear about accessibility issues when the idea of Captchas comes 
up.  I also hear about it when people talk about Flash on web pages, and 
on frames, and on image heavy pages, and so on.

There are two things I have yet to hear:

* I'm blind, and X bothers me.  Here's something that would work.
* I talked to a blind person / organization / read on a site dedicated 
to accessibility that you should do Y.

Has anybody actually gone out to try to find a blind advocacy group, or 
a blind person, and actually asked them what they suggest?  It sounds 
like there's a whole lot of speculation going on, but I would expect 
that if Captchas are a problem, the most likely place to find a solution 
is by talking to blind people.

Ben