Blogger adds audio option for anti-spam verification

CAPTCHA is great–it lets websites and submission forms weed out the spam-bots from real human beings. The concept is simple. You put out a convoluted set of characters–letters and numbers–which only humans can read, and ask the other end to fill in the corresponding letters before hitting the “submit” button. Unfortunately, these images can be so difficult to understand even for some who have perfect vision (but not so perfect imaginations, perhaps?). And it’s against the very concept of accessibility, since preventing bots from reading the characters is effectivel preventing software for the visually-impared from reading them, also.

So what’s a good remedy? The spoken word, of course. If a user can’t read the characters, he/she is likely able to hear the words. And machines are not likely to be able to use this effectively for spamming, unless authors of spamming software are willing to exert enough effort to create a system capable of understanding the synthesized speech.

Google’s popular Blogger weblogging service has been using CAPTCHA for some time in the blog creation interface (to prevent spammers from automating blog creation) and comment forms, much to the dismay of the visually-impaired (and yes, those unimaginative people who can’t read convoluted letters). Other similar services, such as Yahoo Mail, have had audio-verification for some time now. This move by Blogger is particularly welcome, since blogs are beocoming very popular, and as Blogger is one of the most well-known blogging platforms.

To use audio verification, simply click on the “accessibility” icon at the right of the entry form.

One gripe from our end–how can a visually-impaired person determine where the icon is? Or maybe their speech-synthesis software would take care of that, with the appropriate image “alt” tags.