Daniel’s Blog

I’m fairly new to all this blogging stuff, and one of the first questions I had to resolve was what kind of anti-spam measure to deploy. I was almost set to just install CAPTCHA as it had been recommended to me and get on with it. However, while looking into the topic I have been informed that CAPTCHA is not only a good anti-spam solution but also a huge show-stopper for accessibility. It’s rather obvious actually.

As a contributor to the GNOME project, who is aware of the huge accessibility effort put into it since GNOME 2.0, I feel at least a bit awkward to completely shut off my blog’s comment area to a part of our user base. And no, I don’t think that it is unreasonable to assume that visually impaired people actually want to use my site. At least it’s no more unreasonable than to assume that someone is going to read my musings at all.

In short, unceremoniously shutting the gate against disabled people to solve a problem that has nothing whatsoever to do with them is completely unacceptable to me. Heck, I’m not the social romantic kind of guy, and I know that a dedicated blog like mine would probably not be of much use to e.g. many of the mentally disabled. Or to my grandma, for that matter. But there’s no reason whatsoever why this site should be less useful to the visually impaired than to people with perfect eyesight. After all, blind people are uber-geeks who communicate in a secret code resembling an extraterrestical alphabet from planet Braille.

Thus, I decided to rely on Akismet as non-intrusive anti-spamming measure for now. First-time posts are always moderated so no spam should get through. As I don’t have much experience in this matter, it might turn out later that something more is required to cope with spam. I had a look at Hashcash which seemed a nice solution at the first glance. However it makes heavy use of JavaScript features, thus requiring a fairly solid and complete interpreter. From what I understand this rules out current screen reader tools and therefore defeats the purpose.

Maybe I better start piling up some sandbags right now.

So I’ve finally got my own blog up and running, on a personal domain plus accompanied web space generously provided by Murray Cumming. Of course this donation also carries the obligation to make use of it. So far I’ve put together only a minimalistic main page linking to this blog, but there’s more to come. Stay tuned.