Craig Grimes, who has been MIA for a year at AccessibleConsulting, is now back and blogging at Accessible Everything. I’m looking forward to seeing what he has to say. I would have left a comment, but he’s enabled captchas, which are both disability-unfriendly and cross-platform-unfriendly.
I have two arts-based disability blogs and I was unaware of the problem with captchas. So many people use them to avoid spam comments. How do you avoid this? Can you recommend any sites for guidelines for making an accessible web site?
I just found you through Ouch! I look forward to reading more.
I run both of my blogs (reunifygally.wordpress.com and my newest blog http://wecando.wordpress.com) at WordPress.com WordPress filters out spam for you and, for the most part, does a good job. Once in a blue moon a legit post gets marked as spam (I never actually check the spam file to see, but once I did get a complaint about a comment that went missing … and the few times I did check without a complaint I didn’t see any “false positives”). Once in a while you might get a piece of spam mislabled as “legit” (or sent to you with a request for you to “moderate”) … but my blog is set up to send all posted comments (and the few moderation requests) to me via email so on the rare occasion that a spam gets through, I know about it right away and can delete. Overall, I find it works well for me. And readers don’t have to fill out these pass words or whatever in order to post.
I’m interested in ensuring that both my blogs (but ESPECIALLY http://wecando.wordpress.com because that is targeted at a more cross-disability audience … reunifygally.wordpress.com is sort of for people with all disabilities too, but is more targeted at Deaf people … which does still include Deaf-Blind people so I still want that to be accessible also.) Feel free to comment on accessibility at either location — I’d really like to be aware of any problems.
In a completely unrelated issue: I was wondering if you had given any thought to blogging about the ADA Restoration Act of 2007.
You might know that, ever since the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 was passed, the courts have undermined the true intent of the law to the point where employers can essentially say to workers with disabilities, “You’re too disabled, we don’t want to hire you,” but at the same time the courts can tell them, “You’re not disabled enough for us to protect you from being discriminated against on the basis of your disability!” The ADA Restoration Act of 2007 (HR 3195, S 1881) is meant to reverse these trends so that the courts will be forced to read the ADA as it was originally intended by Congress to be interpreted.
If you do write a blog post (or three), please let me know — I’m maintaining an on-going list of links to blog posts about the ADA Restoration Act and would love to be able to link to you. See the links I have so far to what other bloggers have said at http://reunifygally.wordpress.com/on-the-ada-restoration-act-of-2007/ There have been deaf bloggers, and autistic bloggers, and bloggers with epilepsy … but so far, I don’t remember seeing any blind bloggers on this topic. And if you follow the link, you’ll note that it is a long list.