On Mon, 2004-10-25 at 08:54, trans. (T. Onoma) wrote: > On Monday 25 October 2004 11:35 am, Jamis Buck wrote: > | > | ASCII art will still suffer from accessibility issues, since a screen > | reader will not be able to read the ASCII art in any intelligible way to > | the user. :( However, it is an ingenious approach...I'm tempted to look > | into that, JFTHOI. > > There is no way to do otherwise for a captcha system. How would a blind person > every be able to use a captcha system? Think creatively. You could fairly easily come up with a text based captcha system that was screen reader friendly and had no external dependencies. For example test riddles / story problems that would be dirt simple for a human but next to impossible for a program "in the general case" could be rather easily generated in pure ruby. For example: Three things that go "quack" landed in a circular pond that was 10 meters across. They found fourteen early shoes and each of them ate as many as he wanted. How many shoes were left? Most humans could get this on their first try, but I'd hate to have to write a bot to do it. The key is to build up from a small set of parts such that recognising what is expected is not doable from looking at the parts (for example, the last line could have (randomly) been "how many ducks were there?" or "how many pairs were there?" or "how many did they eat?" or "how far where they (at most) from the shore?" or "what word doesn't belong?" or ...) > And a poor man's captcha is hardly a defense at all. I don't think so. It's like the story of the two campers who see a bear*; we don't need to be impenetrable, just more trouble than it's worth, so they'll go elsewhere. -- Markus * One of the campers takes off running, and the other quickly follows. So does the bear. The second camper calls out "I don't think this was such a good idea; we'll never outrun that bear." To which, the first responds, "I don't need to outrun the bear, I just need to outrun you."