phpBB Weekly

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Episode Duration: 1:40:42
On This Episode: Douglas Bell (Fountain of Apples), David Lewis (Highway of Life), and special guest Bernard Meldonado

Disclaimer: We’re still trying to get used to uStream! Unfortunately, the audio for David and Bernard got double-recorded (as we found out after the fact), and we spent a lot of time trying to fix it to no avail. We’re quite disappointed about this considering how wonderful this episode was, but the sound isn’t awful. It just adds some space-agey reverb. We’ll try to avoid this problem in the future, and sorry for the inconvenience on this episode.

Last week, we briefly spent some time discussing CAPTCHAs and their effect on people who are visually impaired. Well, for this episode, we are joined by Bernard Meldonado, the founder of Solona, a volunteer-driven website that helps solve CAPTCHAs for such visually impaired users. In our extended conversation with him, we discuss the state of CAPTCHAs from a blind person’s perspective, the lameness of audio-based CAPTCHAs (with funny examples), and discuss some other services and laws to help make the web accessible. We also discuss a bit about what we would like to see in future phpBB CAPTCHA plugins (any MOD authors listening?), and really consider the future of CAPTCHAs from an accessibility standpoint. And Bernard tells us a lot about Solona and how it operates. If you’ve got some free time to spend and want to help make a difference, we really encourage you to volunteer for Solona and help solve CAPTCHAs! (We have not yet determined if solving that many CAPTCHAs improves or degrades the quality of your eyesight.)

We also cover the recent news of the week, including the phpBB 3.0.6 RC-3 release and the Best CAPTCHA Plugin Competition results.

Our Poll Question is “If you were to add a step to the MOD validation workflow, what would it be?” and continues until October 31. What are you waiting for? Go vote!

The MODs of the Week are Fancy jQuery Captcha by mtotheikle and Sortables CAPTCHA Plugin by Derky. The Style of the Week is Afterburner by RocketTheme.