I have just discovered that Scott Sigler now requires the passing of an inaccessible visual CAPTCHA in order to post comments to his Infection podcast. This disappointing move means that blind and visually impaired people are no longer allowed to fully participate in the exchange associated with his unique podcast novel experiments. Scott’s podcasts are associated with Adam Curry’s Podshow network. If Podshow provides the blogging platform and the inaccessible CAPTCHA that goes with it, then this “no blind people allowed sign” would represent yet one more area in which the company has not yet delivered on its public pledge of making accessibility a core part of the Podshow DNA going forward from last November’s Portable Media Expo and Podcasting Conference.
Advocating full participation through equal accessibility.
Well they use wordpress and wordpress has tons of accessible plugins so who ever is working with them on the wordpress stuff is to stupid to use one of the accessible plugins like Akismet or Spam Karma (the top two anti-spam wordpress tools). WP even has a pure javascript plugin that requires JS to be exicuted before you can comment and it uses a random 128 bit key (or how ever long you want it to be) for the JS.
I’ve been doing WP Development for a while now and accessibility is a big topic since WP is open source. You should get in touch with Matt at wordpress and see about working with him on some kind of accessibility policy for WP.
http://www.photomatt.net/
Guess this prooves why I listen to hardly any podshow shows…though many are not as stupid as some Lifespring for example…which come to think of it is the only podshow show I listen to.
WP Developer
The problem is that we’re getting crushed by spam. It’s unfortunate that you think the shows are stupid – you try going through 500 blog comments a day and sorting out the good stuff from fans from the garbage that fills my in-box. We will look for a better solution – do you have a SPECIIC WP PLUGIN that can remove spam but remain accessible?
Daryl, didn’t you see my post? I posted a reply here. I hope something happened to it and it didn’t reach you, as opposed to you not posting it.