^^^Jesse how would a blind person would be able to access the internet in the first place?

Terrell, there are browsing devices available called ’screen readers’ that read the content of a page out aloud — effectively turning the web into a giant podcast.

Users with vision issues quickly become very proficient with these devices and navigate through pages at a similar rate to you or I.

In fact, the average blind user probably spends more time online each day than sighted users. Compared to printed brochures, TV guides and hard copy recipe books, the web provides the easiest and most direct access to the same information — provided the web page author hasn’t done something silly like turning text into an image which can’t be read by the screen reader applicatation.

I just don’t see how any site using Captcha can be considered W3C compliant.

Most of the time these questions will need to be very simple, which means there are often a limited number of potential answers. If you wrote a system to blindly try, 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10, red, green, blue, yellow, purple and white, I think you’d have knocked over half these types of Captchas in the first minute. Expanding that list to 100 potential answers wouldn’t he hard, and recording which answers worked which which canned question means the system gets more efficient as it works.

The big problem with most systems is that they all rely on at least some level of sight, and sometimes even perfect vision. Your overlayed letters method might work fine under normal circumstances, but does it work the same if someone with reduced vision has scaled up their font size? Imagine asking a blind person ‘what color is this puppy?’ or ‘how many kittens are there?’ is obviously ridiculous.

Even worse, any moron can sit there and type 10,000 correct captcha’s in an eight hour period. Thus, they are a waste. They jut use a robot to set 10000 pages, an the user simply enters the captcha info. (While the advanced robots just OCR the image.)

Here is a great trick, make all the captcha images animated GIF, with the first frame as wrong data. Then, the second frame, clear to read, has the correct data. Why, you ask… Because OCR reads STILL images, gif, as a still image, only shows frame 1. They will quickly read the wrong info, and be lost. Again, you could make the image twice as large, and display it with an offset, set as a table background. The wrong letters being on top, or scattered about the borders. While the image is displayed, for humans, with an offset of -100, -50, which only displays the correct letters to the user.

Here is another novel idea… No images required. Simply ask them two math problems. What is (11+3=?), type your answer in the yellow box. What is (8-2=?), type your answer in the green box. Use a mixture of WHITE on WHITE fake numbers, and HTML CHR codes. You can even use hidden fake answers, in unseen table cells. Robots read HTML TEXT, they do not look at the actual displayed page. If you changed your format on every confirm, they would have to program for eons to handle your changing format. (CSS CellA Display Hidden) If you created the page, you know what data to expect. That is 10000 times faster then transferring a dynamically create image.)

For extra validation, use one image, (The word “ONE”, a playing card “SEVEN”, a dice “FIVE”, a group of ducks “THREE”) Ask them, what number does this image represent? I could go-on for days… CAPCHA died ten years before it was born. I would not doubt, if the people who created it, created it, for the sole purpose of selling the OCR bots that read them. OCR has been around for 20 years, twist OCR is rather new, but only for the public.

The best form of anti-spam, is a simple precounter for any page. Pretend to load a page with a serial, all images with hotlink protection… The delay should be approximately 2min. Only because “New accounts” are not a daily visit, nor are postings. If they want it, they will wait. Show them TOS and PRIVACY rules to kill time. (Recorded in a database for that page serial.) Give the guests a pretend “LOADING”, and show an expected “FINISHED LOADING” ending time. (Progress bar). After that time, the submit button shows. If it is a robot created page off-site, they can not see the hot-linked images. If the page has an invalid serial, or a serial that was created 1.5 minutes ago, the page fails. Again, you also show a PAGE EXPIRE time, lets say, 5 min… Pages older then five minutes, have to be reloaded. (That stops robots from preloading pages for “BOB” to sit and enter CAPTCHA codes all day.)

Do not blink, do not pass go… send me $200.00.

Hehe… Thank-you, hope I did not waste your time. Jason DAngelo
(Feel free to remove my site link, if it offends.)
http://www.MYeTAG.com

GigoIt’s HumanAuth is based off the ideas presented by KittenAuth.com. HumanAuth supports ADA and Section 508 requirements, increased security and includes watermarked images with random positioning. HumanAuth ensures that an actual human is using your site without forcing them to read distorted CAPTCHA text.

http://www.gigoit.org/humanauth/