] The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) issued on Wednesday a
] draft criticizing visual verification tests Web-based
] e-mail services and other Internet businesses use. The
] tests are designed to prevent software robots from
] registering numerous accounts and harvesting information
] for spam schemes and the like.

This is something that you are likely to see on MemeStreams soon, so any discussion here is pretty timely... Fortunately, there is an easy solution for me, which is to ask visually impaired people to email me.

I'm not sure how reasonable the web really is for the visually impaired. It is a visual medium. You scan with your eyes and pick out what you really want to read. If you had to have all of the extraneous menus read to you every time you viewed a page I think I'd skip it and listen to TV instead. RSS feeds that we produce are probably a 1000 times more helpful to blind people then the web pages themselves. Anyone up here know anyone who is visually impaired?

As for federated id systems, any identity like that is either going to have to employ one of the systems we're discussing here, or its going to have to use some sort of personal verification which will be intrusive from a privacy perspective. We could get rid of all the spam in a jiffy if we wanted to eliminate anonymnity. The problem is retaining anonymity while eliminating spam.