{"id":2245,"date":"2014-01-28T09:05:39","date_gmt":"2014-01-28T14:05:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/?p=2245"},"modified":"2014-01-28T09:05:39","modified_gmt":"2014-01-28T14:05:39","slug":"the-problem-with-captchas-12814","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.equipmentlink.org\/blog\/?p=2245","title":{"rendered":"The problem with Captchas, 1\/28\/14"},"content":{"rendered":"

The problem with Captchas<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Contributed by Joel Zimba, Special Projects Coordinator, MDTAP<\/em><\/p>\n

According to a recent Ted Radio Hour episode, n.pr\/1bOzlZ<\/a>, we spent 500,000 hours solving Captchas world wide. Chances are, you run into them all the time.<\/p>\n

A Captcha is the little box, usually on a website, which asks you to type the blurry words\/letters that appear\u00a0in a picture.\u00a0 The idea is to have you prove you are a human, and not some sort of automated tool\u2014effective, but terribly annoying.\u00a0 They are far more than annoying to users of screen access software. \u00a0Captchas are more like an immediate accessibility barrier.\u00a0 There is just no way for a screen reader to tell what is in the blurry picture.\u00a0 If there were, then an automated tool could do the same thing, resulting in the Captca being pointless.<\/p>\n

Ironically, many Captchas are being used to do important work, like digitizing books or language translation.\u00a0 The very Captcha which prevents me from independently logging on to many popular websites or making purchases may also be producing a book in a more accessible format.<\/p>\n

The only thing worse than a visual Captcha is an audio Captcha.\u00a0 It\u2019s the same idea, but the execution proves to be far more difficult.\u00a0 An audio clip is played and the words or numbers must be typed by the user.\u00a0 It sounds simple, but the sound is often deliberately garbled to make the task more difficult for those pesky robots.\u00a0 Challenge your friends and family to the audio Captcha solving challenge.\u00a0 If you happen to know a World War II short wave radio operator, you too may be able to buy Warp Tour tickets this Summer.<\/p>\n

If you use FireFox running on the Windows platform, you can try the WebVisum extension.\u00a0 It might solve some Captchas, though it takes far longer than the average of ten seconds sited in the NPR piece.\u00a0 Anyone else is out of luck.\u00a0 We welcome your innovative solutions to the Captcha problem.<\/p>\n

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