The increasingly popular visual test, and the difficulty of using current work-arounds, has raised enough hackles among advocates for the disabled that working groups within the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) Web Accessibility Initiative have begun discussions on how to standardise an alternative. Two WAI working groups are hashing out proposals to guide Web sites in designing blind-friendly bot repellants, and the WAI hopes to address the issue in the next working draft of its Web Accessibility Guidelines, Version 2.0, which is due by year's end. So far, published working drafts of the guidelines are silent on the issue. "What visual verification is testing is whether someone is a sighted human, even if that's not the intent of the organisations using it," said Judy Brewer, director of the WAI. "This has been a known problem for several years, and I know that we've received different complaints about it. But it's not necessarily an easy problem to solve." One spam opponent came to the defense of companies with visual tests, calling the tests crucial weapons against the growing legions of spam-sending machines. "Anything that restricts people's ability to use email lessens its usefulness as a communications medium," said Laura Atkins, president of the SpamCon Foundation. "On the surface, it's not a good thing. But there's so much abuse out there that the (Internet service providers) have to do it. Any site that does it should provide an alternate way for a blind person to sign up. But you can't condemn the ISPs for doing what they're doing to minimise the abuse."
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