Steve Bauer, host of the Smooth Jazz U.S.A. show on ACB Radio Interactive tells us about his experience as a blind person dealing with word verification while setting up a blog at Blogger, only to have it classified as spam and thus locked out of posting new articles to his own blog! We now have our first confirmed case of Google’s censorship of blind bloggers!

Friday evening (11/11/05) I started to try and set up my first blog on
blogspot.com. Everything went pretty well until the visual verification came up. Fortunately, my wife was able to assist me in getting past that obsticle. I proceeded on to set things up. My wife helped select the colors and fonts and things seemed to be moving smoothly. Well, that’s what they appeared to do.

Somehow, I got my first post to appear. Feeling somewhat confident, I
tried post number 2. Boom, bang, bash!!! To be assured that my post was from a human, another visual verification popped up. This time, my wife was not available.

Later, when she came in, I tried again, the visual verification came
up. She typed it in for me and the second post went up. As you can tell, this is not something that will work. My wife is not always around, nor does she have interest in holding my hand and doing this everytime I want to post an article.

Another very strange thing is in the Profile setup, there is a place
where you can put the url to your photo. I did this, selected save,
but when I would go back to Profile Configuration, the url to my photo was gone.

Blogspot seems to be quite easy to navigate and set up, but not for a blind person. The visual verification is resulting in me looking for another service to host my blog.