[Haskell-cafe] How to use a wiki to annotate GHC Docs? was Re: [Haskell] Re: Making Haskell more open

[Cale Gibbard]

On 16/11/05, Philippa Cowderoy <flippa at flippac.org> wrote:
> On Wed, 16 Nov 2005, Arthur van Leeuwen wrote:
>
> > A nicer solution might be to have the server generate a distorted image
> > of a key (as is done with user registration to combat automated user
> > generation)
> > that should be typed in for an edit to be accepted (if you are not logged
> > in).
> >
>
> This comes with accessibility issues, much as any other text represented
> by images, only more so as the whole point is to fool OCR software.
>
Surely we wouldn't use captchas on edits by registered users, so
there'd still be a way for those users with vision problems to make
edits, they'd just have to log in. If people want to use captchas as
part of the process in signing up for an account, then there should be
an alternate mechanism for people with accessibility issues. I wonder
how well an audio version of the captcha test would work -- one could
probably rig up festival to generate sounds of words linked alongside
the distorted picture which blind users could listen to and type into
the field.

It's unfortunate, but if you don't put a little bit of effort into
defending your forms, they will eventually get quite a lot of spam.
Cleaning up 600+ pages by hand takes quite a lot of effort, even with
the ability to revert. Mass reverting would be another way to try to
deal with it. Another way to raise the bar a bit perhaps would be to
randomise the names of the form controls slightly, so that a spambot
couldn't just use the same names for things every time, it would have
to properly load the page and scrape the names out.
 - Cale