First, thanks to "Paladine" and "PriceChild" for pointing me in the direction of this forum.
One of the stated aims of the Ubuntu project is "to make Ubuntu, and its derivatives, usable by as many people as possible across ages, languages and physical abilities":
http://www.ubuntu.com/products/whati.../accessibility
The Ubuntu Forums are an important support option for Ubuntu:
http://www.ubuntu.com/support
Indeed, users are often directed to search the forums before using other support options.
The forums include an "Accessibility Discussions" forum:
http://ubuntuforums.org/forumdisplay.php?f=145
It's recommended by the Accessibility wikipage:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Accessibility
Contrary to one suggestion made on IRC, the fact that the HTML used by vBulletin forums is not ideal does not mean the forums are unusable with assistive technology. Such software and its users have to adapt to bad websites all the time.
However, the Ubuntu forum team have introduced a significant and unnecessary accessibility barrier to posting to the forums by choosing to enable the vBulletin visual CAPTCHA to inhibit registration and by requiring registration to contact an admin.
The accessibility problems of image-only CAPTCHAs, and their fundamental unacceptability to people with visual impairments, are notorious:
http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/
http://www.456bereastreet.com/archiv...accessibility/
http://www.captcha.net/
http://www.afb.org/Section.asp?Secti...ocumentID=3153
http://www.nfb.org/nfb/NewsBot.asp?M...W&ID=51&SnID=2
vBulletin allows you to enable visual CAPTCHA and set its difficulty level:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/m...group_register
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/m...image_settings
However, the developers clearly didn't envisage this being the only way to register, since vBulletin also has provision for adding users manually:
http://www.vbulletin.com/docs/html/main/users_add
If you look at what vBulletin do themselves, while they do use their visual CAPTCHA on their forum, they also make it easy to find their email address:
http://www.vbulletin.com/contact.php
By contrast, the Ubuntu forum team have compounded the problems of the visual CAPTCHA by choosing not to provide any obvious way to contact an admin without registering.
The CAPTCHA project (who created CAPTCHAs in the first place) stress that CAPTCHA implementations must be accessible, and that most CAPTCHA implementations are both insecure and inaccessible. They recommend using their own reCAPTCHA, which includes an audio alternative for the visually impaired. reCAPTCHA is not a sufficient solution, since it still excludes deafblind users, but it would be a vast improvement over vBulletin's CAPTCHA. As there is already a reCAPTCHA plugin for vBulletin, the forums team should considering using it in place of vBulletin's native CAPTCHA:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=151824
One way to cater for deafblind users too might be to combine the reCAPTCHA plugin with something like the question-and-answer-based NoSPAM CAPTCHA plugin:
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=124828
I don't know enough about the vBulletin plugin system to able to say how feasible it would be to combine two plugins in this way.
The other easy option is to link from the main registration form to a contact form including all the information required for registration with which deafblind users (and others who cannot use the CAPTCHA, for example, if they are operating from a console-only installation) could register.
If necessary, this could be safeguarded from run-of-the-mill spambots by a question-and-answer CAPTCHA similar to NoSPAM. The questions should be relatively simple so as to mimimize the exclusion of people with learning disabilities or who face language barriers.
The contact form could also (or additionally) be protected by non-CAPTCHA methods such as:
* Checking POSTs to the form's action have been preceeded by GET requests for the form page.
* Tricking bots with dummy "Do not fill in this field" form fields that are labelled as such and also hidden with CSS.
* Limiting the frequency of POSTs from any given IP.
* Rejecting duplicate POSTs.
* Rejecting POSTs containing content that looks like spam or other abuse.
See also:
http://www.arraystudio.com/as-worksh...ernatives.html
http://webaim.org/blog/2007/03/07/sp...essible_forms/
While such protection could be (relatively easily) cracked by writing a custom script, there would be no commercial incentive to do so, since a contact form is not bulk spam vector.
Although the contact form couldn't be used for spam, obviously users wishing to annoy the admins could use it. If the admins fear that the volume of verbal abuse sent via this form would still be too high to cope with, I am happy to set up a dedicated email account to which they could forward all form submissions. I would volunteer to sort out genuine requests and forward them on to forum administrators who could then add accounts for the users in question.
Making it clear that the person who reads the email doesn't work on any other aspect of the forum would also reduce the amount of abuse.
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