[whyhellothere]

Unfortunately (at least in the UK) this technique cannot be used on consumer facing sites as it breaks the accessibility of the form for some disabled users.

For personal sites it really comes down to your preferences. Personally I would prefer that everyone was able to comment, however if it stops you having to wade through thousands of spam messages every day I can see the point of using it.

[vidarh]

Why would this be an accessibility problem? I don't see why screen readers would have a problem dealing with it - for them the form in the users browser will appear just the same as it otherwise would.

[Isofarro]

1.) Screenreaders have different modes of operation for different aspects of web content. For dealing with Forms they have Forms mode, in which only form elements are announced. A link isn't a form element, so they wont see the submit button.

2.) Screenreader users have a shortcut key to submit the form - typically when under-qualified web developers create forms without submit buttons. This fires the form submit event, which without a JavaScript preventDefault will get the form contents sent to the URL mentioned in the action attribute on the form. So the screen reader user's comment is treated as spam.

[whyhellothere]

You are right to question this. There does seem to be a bit of a long standing myth that ALL javascript is bad for accessibility: http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2011/javascript-and-screenreade...

In this case though, from an accessibility point of view there are a few issues with the use of a link tag rather than the standard form 'input submit' or 'button'.

Problems include:

- It goes against user expectations of how the form functions

- User would not be able to submit the form while focus is on one of the inputs (although this could be remedied with more js)

- User would have to realise that this form does not have a standard submit button and realise that the link tag is the submit button (difficult for screen readers because there are no alt tags).

There is also an issue with usability for the few who don't have js enabled, as they will not be able to submit this form.