Friday, October 07, 2005

Comments and Visual Impairments

I am getting regularly spammed now and it's on the increase. I can't spend all day going through and deleting every one, but I don't want to put the word verication in place if this renders the comments inaccessible to people with visual impairments, dyslexia etc. I have enough trouble with it myself. How are others finding it?

Ideally, I would password-protect the comments facility but put the password conspicuously on the blog. Unfortunately, I doubt the blogger technology will allow that, but I'm going to have a play anyway. In the meantime does anyone have any hot ideas as to how we can protect ourselves from spammers without becoming partially inaccessible?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I use Movable Type for my blog and it has some useful tools for spam avoidance such as a blacklist of referers and a plug-in that flags a comment if it breaches certain rules like including words like "viagra", "penis" or "Timmargh smells".

Hopefully Blogger will at some point allow you to use something like this instead of the crappy word verification technique.

Anonymous said...

Sorry to hear of your post problems, unfortunately I do not have an answer to your botherment. I too have been assailed by spammers ever since I replied to someones blog. These spammers mainly emanate from West Africa and are friendly fellows wishing to share their wealth with me, such nice people. I have now given them each others email addys, just to help you understand.

On a different note you may have seen some of mentalasaforks artwork via an upper class person. If you would like for me to do the same for you, just ask Lady B for my addy. Best wishes pete

imfunnytoo said...

When I got spammed I made the difficult choice of using word verification, much as I didn't like the idea of making it inacessible for the visually impaired.

Yahoo has a similar tool, *but* they have a link below that directs visually impaired users to click if they cannot see the word verification information...I sent Blogger a note about this when my blog started up, and of course...no answer