Wednesday, June 20, 2012

Prove You're a Human!

Alright, this drives me really crazy. You are a visually impaired blogger but you put a captcha on your blog to filter spam comment. Next I know, I will have to decipher a captcha even for viewing some posts. Please stop using challenge-response systems for comments. No one likes spam. But you can moderate your comments instead of putting a captcha. And if you didn't know they have figured out how to bypass captcha.

There is no dearth of CAPTCHA on the web. I've a plethora  of those squished, squiggly, irksome letters to deal with for payment gateways. And of course, every time I forget a password of my nth account, I am sent straight to the captcha gallows. (breach of some electronic code of conduct?). And if entering correct password wasn't enough, I'm given a 10 minute captcha treatment for even changing system. What is next? Browsing habit? Say if I login at 4 am to Facebook on a weekday!?!

Sometimes I wonder if the new technology is rather creating more accessibility issues.




June 25, 2012, Update - I guess I was just high on irk quotient that day. Even simple navigation is quite a challenge if you have low vision, so troubleshooting is obviously tedious. Lot of my low vision friends may not know that captchas can be disabled! We get so used to seeing them everywhere anyway.

 To disable word verification for blogger comments, go to your blog settings > Posts and comments and disable "show word verification" option. You can still avoid spam by selecting comment moderation.



4 comments:

Unknown said...

This seems strikingly similar to a post I did just 5 days before yours on the same exact topic lol Some bloggers are new to the blogsphere and learning the ropes- be patient with us-especially since we ARE visually impaired and that adds a whole new element to the effort of discovery...

Bhumika said...

Actually I felt like correcting this post after seeing your comment on FB :) I guess it is difficult to troubleshoot with low vision. BTW this post was not meant to be in response to your blog :) I actually cannot read anything there as everything is in HTML. Even if I use magnification, the size of text becomes bigger but not really gets bold/magnified...How do you read? Do you use screenreader?

Unknown said...

I use Zoom on my Mac and I have a29" monitor. The text on your blog is just as fuzzy on my magnifier as mine is on my magnifier. Not sure ow to make it better :/

Bhumika said...

Tanna, on your browser, you can zoom in, increase font size. Press and hold Ctrl key and press + key to get to the desired magnification. Try with your two blogs because one is in HTML and other in rich text, you will see the difference :)