How Would You Design a Captcha for the Deaf-Blind? 99
kesuki asks: "Right now, the state of the art captcha only works for the visually-abled. Some people are trying to start a grass roots opposition to catcha using existing anti-discrimination laws. However, without any captcha at all, spammers would have a field day. Audio captcha would work for the blind, of course, but they still leave out the deaf-blind using brail interpreters to use their computers and navigate the web. What system of captcha can you dream up that would work for the deaf-blind?"
My 2 cents... (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance: What website with content for deaf-blind (_only_ text) would require registration to retrieve such information?
Yeah, I know (from TFA) some blogs have captcha registration, but do they require registration?
Anywho, my answer. Hire an assistant/interpreter. That would probably be much cheaper, and much easier.
Either that, or I would send the authors of the web-site a e-mail, and if it's not a heavy traffic one, they could probably help you out, even though you can't read the captcha.
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:2)
The question isn't what makes sense, it's how you would deal with a law that ties your hands. (If you take Adrian Trenholm's word that his country regulates the accessibility of blogs.)
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:2)
23000 deafblind people in the UK alone. [rnid.org.uk]
Hire an assistant/interpreter. That would probably be much cheaper, and much easier.
What the hell are you smoking?
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:1)
I probably register on far more sites online than the regular guy. Still I can't remember the last time I had to use captcha (maybe two or three times the last year).
How many of the 23K do you think _regularly_ has to interpret one? Every single one, every single day?
Now who's smoking?
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:2)
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:1)
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:2)
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:1)
As far as I understand, it used to be that one used the captcha if they had low karma, but it's not like that anymore.
The point of my post, which I guess seems rather unclear now that I reread it, is that *now* a captcha is still required, but if you aren't logged in.
I apologize for the confusion.
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:1)
Actually, "There are about 23,000 deafblind people in the UK. Some will be totally deaf and totally blind, while many others will have some hearing and/or vision."
From my reading of the link, I get the sense that many deafblind people can be helped by equipment to help people who are only deaf or blind.
"Deafblind people can get equipment to help them live independently. These include alarm clocks with large raised numbers, computer packages that display text on
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:2)
it works for spammers too (Score:2)
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:3, Informative)
I was thinking of such uncommon sites as slashdot.org (low karma users had manditory captchas to post, and they still may have random/anti flood ones) or perhaps Google.com's blogger.com which requires a captcha for every comment. I was also thiking of e-mail signups at yahoo.com hotmail.com mail.com etc. Anyone at anytime could loose both their hearing and their vision, either from infection, o
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:2)
And if you are deaf/blind, email is pretty much the only way you can communicate.
Re:My 2 cents... (Score:1)
Had a similar idea (Score:3, Informative)
Okay, this is a shameless plug, but I started work sometime ago on http://aomis.net/ [aomis.net] (I won't href it). Anyways, the idea was instead of CAPTCHA, which I don't really like, I thought why not let users identify different types of media. Now, I hadn't considered folks who were blind and deaf, but I did build the system to handle multiple types of media, like pictures and audio, which would help folks that are blind or deaf, but not both.
Now, the sites not quite ready, I'm still playing with a few things, like getting more media into it, but I'll have to watch this Ask Slashdot for good ideas on how to handle those who are blind and deaf.
Re:Had a similar idea (Score:2)
A math question (Score:3, Interesting)
Challenge (example): "seven times three"
Response "twenty one"
Re:A math question (Score:1)
It has to be flawed, and it has to be dynamic.
Re:A math question (Score:5, Insightful)
What is 6 minus the sum of 2 and 2?
Is 2 higher than eighteen?
Which of the following is an animal? Brick, horse, factory, sky.
Type four letter Q's then the letter N.
How many P's in pineapple?
Re:A math question (Score:1)
Re:A math question (Score:2)
How are you creating the variations?
Your scheme fails because the level of effort to create a variation or to defeat one is about the same.
Whatever re-wording algorithm you write, will be subject to a similar "solving" algorithm, and the system doesn't provide any order of magnitude advantages for the goods guys like crypto does.
A potential solution might be to ask questions that a computer simply cannot answer "Will
Re:A math question (Score:2)
The halting problem is only unsolvable in general; that is, no computer can decide it for every conceivable piece of code. But it's quite possible, often trivial, in the vast majority of cases. Computers would probably do at least as well as people on that captcha.
Re:A math question (Score:2)
so it should be more like this?
Challenge (example): 53v3n +1m35 +hr33
Response +w3n+y 1!1!!1!!!!!!
not so great... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A math question (Score:3, Interesting)
Challenge: "sevn t1mes thrree"
Response: "21"
Humans are good at figuring out missspelled words and what they are. I guess someone could use a spell check library, but massaging it to hac
Re:A math question (Score:2)
Re:A math question (Score:1)
The above example would read something like:
"sev en tee one mess tea h are ree"
Try reading it out loud and see if it makes any sense to you. Jumbled together from a poor computer generated voice it might sound like:
"73 messy tea area"
I can't say I have a solution, just that this one might not work well.
Re:A math question (Score:2)
Re:A math question (Score:3, Informative)
Since I'm still trying to figure out what you mean (even with the spelling correction), that wouldn't make a good test. You'd eliminate those who can't make an immediate distinction. The idea behind such tests is to show a human something that they can immediately associate and give the correct answer. Giving out word problems and puzzles will on
Re:A math question (Score:2)
google beats this (Score:2)
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=seven+times+
seven times three = twenty-one
Re:A math question (Score:2)
How about... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How about... (Score:2)
ideally yes they should.
However when the choice is between having a site thats unusable to everyone because of spambots and a site thats unusable to some disabled people because of anti-spam measures which is the sensible choice?
Re:How about... (Score:2)
There are already TTY operators that deaf people have access to through their telephone line and a special device, and this same service can also be accessed over the internet these days. Conceivably, a deaf-blind person that is challenged with a graphical captcha right now just has to go to his TTY operator on the net, using a computer with a braille display, and talk them into going to the site and signing them up. Why not? It's already there, they're there to hel
Re:How about... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about... (Score:2)
Well for brail... (Score:1)
However, not being deaf/blind myself my view is limited. The real people to ask are the deaf and blind since they would probably have far more creative solution for checking user validity using the input/output devices that they are accustomed to using.
Deaf and blind? (Score:2)
I'd hate to simply block people off, but I understand why people that use it.
I would expect thtat the anti-discriminatory laws probably won't do jack for individual site administrators.
disclosure: I am partially deaf but see 20/20 with correcti
Processor time (Score:2)
There have been ideas to have email "stamps" where the sender "pays" by working out something that is easy to check, but difficult to compute, like factorising something. Wouldn't that work just as well for this? The downside is that it needs the browser to know about it to be completely transparent to the end-user.
On the other hand, CAPTCHAs are already broken [wikipedia.org], so this is only suitable for deterring the most stupid spammers in the first place.
Re:Processor time -- nope, spammers have LOTS (Score:2)
Now, spammers use Windows boxes that have been taken over. They could do supercomputing.
self-describing sentences (Score:3, Interesting)
But then someone will complain "By using sentences, you're blocking out all the blind deaf non-native-english-speakers, who can't determine the subtleties of meaning any better than a computer!"
Eventually there has to be a cut-off point.
Yes, I am talking about trying to get a computer to randomly generate riddles.
Easy (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Easy (Score:1)
If you are having difficulty with this image call 18XX-XXX-XXXX. Problem solved. The Telephone is the wheelchair ramp to the internet.
Re:Easy (Score:2)
At first, I thought the personal approach was best but there are a few flaws with this reasoning.
1. Anyone with programming experience can customize several responses and randomly send them out. If they're real creative, they can tell the program to pick from a list of sentence
Identity system like OpenID as alternate login (Score:3, Interesting)
Rob
How about (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about (Score:1)
Reading Comprehension (Score:2)
A phone number (Score:4, Insightful)
Perhaps do this as a service for ALL interested web sites to share.
Sometimes we geeks forget that everthing doesn't have to be solved by high-tech wizardry.
Re:A phone number (Score:2)
Re:A phone number (Score:3, Funny)
They will fail the simple Turing test given by any operator who asks "how's the weather over there" or "can you believe that game last night?"
It's a person. A human being. How do you suppose a bot is going to do this?
REGISTERBOT: "Hello. I would like to sign up for an account."
OPERATOR: "Ok, No problem. What's your name?"
REGISTERBOT: "John Doe."
OPERATOR: "Hey, my in-laws are named Doe, are
Re:A phone number (Score:2)
Re:A phone number (Score:2)
this is a TTY you're talking about, ie, TEXT terminal. there's no voice
Undulation (Score:2)
Entire avoidance (Score:3, Interesting)
Then when you get a request, manually assist them assuming they send a nice enough email. Get 500 email requests? mass delete.
Don't forget captchas are to prevent repetitive automated signups, not just a single signup.
What about (Score:2)
Choose the correct answer:
Cats have _____ (a) fur (b) hair (c-d) other bogus choices
Ice is made of ________ (a) water (b) purple (c) grass (d) trees
Just use things that are common knowledge to humans but that'd be tough for computers to figure out. Of course, CAPTCHA systems are always vulnerable (the attacker can just pass through the challenge to the victim), but they provide more than zero security.
Re:What about (Score:2)
Having said all of that, I hate the idea of CAPTCHAS and really hate the ones that go so overboard that I can barely solve them myself.
Re:What about (Score:2)
Re:What about (Score:2)
Re:What about (Score:2)
Alternative Hits
Water 28,700,000
Purple 3,770,000
Grass 4,560,000
Trees 8,390,000
On the first question a simple query actually returned more hits for hair than fur. If you put the question in quotation marks you get the results 1,040 to 579 in favour of "fur".
There are actually people doing research on giving programs "common sense" like this by doing clever things with electronically available information.
I wouldn't (Score:3, Informative)
Use ASCII questions (Score:2)
Works perfectly with screen-readers.
--paulj
Long-winded English, maybe? (Score:4, Interesting)
So, if I understand this right, you need a computer to be able to randomly generate a question and corresponding answer from scratch (pulling it out of a database would presumably just lead to the spammers cataloguing all of the question componenets), but on the other hand, you need a computer to not be able to work out the answer when given just the question.
My best idea is to get it to generate long-winded English sentences along the lines of this:
It would probably be a lot easier to just have a human being read each post and make sure it's not spam before displaying it publicly though, as is the case with moderated newsgroups.
At the rate we're headed, it seems like pretty soon Google will be able to whip up a robot that can beat the Turing test or Voight-Kampff empathy test.
sidestep the issue (Score:2)
sort of like handicapped parking rather than making all parking spaces accessable to handicapped people we set aside alternative places to park which require a basic form of authentication (tags and stickers) the internet lends
Re:sidestep the issue (Score:2)
Easy.... (Score:2)
And so on...
Of course, this discriminates against users
One word: (Score:2)
Harrison Bergeron (Score:1)
e-bay or paypal already has this (Score:1, Flamebait)
Is it secure? Well I suppose both speech and sight can be regonized by software. Just make the sound with background noise that humans have no trouble with but machines do. Same as the visual ones.
Really the question seems immensly stupid to me. Gee, we got blind people who can't see a piece of text. Oh my go
Mis-use of CAPTCHA (Score:1)
Tactile mouse? (Score:1)
a better question (Score:2)
Seriously, I have no idea. Quick google shows nothing.
Re:a better question (Score:1)
Some info about deaf/blind individuals (Score:2, Insightful)
We normally communicated with the students using "tactile" sign language, which is essentially American Sign Language with the "listener's" hands resting
Simple Math Problem (Score:2)
Um (Score:2)
Re:Um (Score:2)
easy (Score:1)
Simple. (Score:1)
on your registration do this:
please respond to the following captcha, or if you are unable to respond do to physical handicaps and/or do not have someone to assist you please click "this link."
this link would send an email requesting registration, the Administrator then checks over the info and either auths them or not.
Why is this so difficult?