Update on Capthcha Issue with Blog Carnival
T.Reid, of the Reid My Mind blog, sent my a kind email today, recognizing that we have steered away from using the blog carnival service to publicize or receive submissions for our blog carnival on assistive technology. You can read his post on this here.
I really didn’t mean to get in the middle of a heated issue - but ever since I got caught up in the blog carnival captcha it has made me more sensitive to what is going on. I spent a good deal of time this past week working with a boy on getting his Braillenote to get on the Internet. He is blind and was wanting to access his own email and get online to download and upload documents. I helped him set up his gmail account and Google docs and calendar so he can work online anywhere - he goes to the Oregon School for the Blind in the summer and does work experience, etc.
He was thrilled. I was glad I could walk him through it because in some step of a process, there was the captcha again. Tonight I went on several blogs and commented and …there it was again - without a disability access alternative. This isn’t only a speed bump but a brick wall and I recognize that now. From now on, every time I see a captcha required, I think, “There’s another place shutting folks out.”
Will you help us and send an email to the blog carnival service (on my sidebar) or any other site you come across that doesn’t provide an alternative and ask them to do something about it?
Thanks…All the best to you,
Lon
Tags: Assistive technology, captcha, visual disability access
June 5th, 2008 at 12:19 pm
Hi Lon and thanks for blogging about this. I have tried numerous times to contact Blog Carnival with absolutely no success. One possible solution I came up with was notifying the ACB about this. I might try that. I’m not a member of either ACB or the NFB, for the simple reason that they don’t get along for the better part. There are some issues on which they agree, but CAPTCHA doesn’t seem to be one of them. Awhile Darrell Shandrow of http://www.blindaccessjournal.com wrote the NFB President seeking an answer to this, but nobody ever responded. I think this would be something to try though.