Google's Doing It Again!

Greetings. I was over at Darrell Shandrow's podcast/blog, Blind Access Journal, and saw much to my amazement that Google, and more specifically their Blogger service, is moving further away from accessibility with their word verification service. Since I wrote about that on Tuesday, I won't go into the explanation again, except to say that instead of moving toward an acceptable resolution of the problem, Blogger appears to be going the other direction. They are now going to implement word verification for people that post to Blogger. Darrell explains their plans better than I can, so I'd highly recommend you download his latest podcast and read the articles he has linked to. This doesn't mean that I won't be able to post to this blog, but it might delay my posts from being posted to Blogger.

After reading this new material I'm very upset by this direction that Google and Blogger insist in going in. Darrell offers a plan to get involved in attempting to talk with Google/Blogger about the problem, and again, I would highly suggest you get involved. I'm doing my part here by informing you, the reader, about the incident. I also plan to put a word up on my website in a little while about this mess, since I'm sure that there are many people that might visit my site but who haven't been to this blog, shame on them. Anyway, another thing that I'm definitely going to take a close look at is moving my blog from Blogger to Live Journal.

In helping my coworker to setup her blog this week, I've seen a little of how Live Journal operates, and based on how they handled their own visual verification process (which I wrote on Tuesday), I'm inclined to support a company that at least makes an effort, verses one that seems to move further away from a reasonable solution. Not only that, apparently various people in the blind community, including Darrell, have attempted to inform Blogger and Google of their shortcomings, but for whatever reason, their words have gone unheard or ignored. Promises have been made which have not been kept, such as an accessibility solution in one or two months, which was made back in July by a Blogger representative. Here we are in October; where's the accessibility?

I don't want to move from Blogger, since they are apart of Google and Google seems to be a trend setter in the online world. Many of the big things that they have done have been noticed by many people. However, that's exactly why this visual verification issue is so important, since Google is such a trend setter, if they start it then other sites are likely to follow.

I'm not sure what needs to be done, but I am definitely highly considering moving my blog away from Blogger over this. So, go to Darrell's blog, listen to his 10/19/05 podcast, and consider what you can or should do.