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Thread: word verification
Number of posts in this thread: 12 (In chronological order)
From: marvin hunkin
Date: Wed, Feb 08 2006 10:30PM
Subject: word verification
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Hi.
what has happened with the nfb and kurt trying to get the big net
companies to make their signup or signin more easily for us vips.
has anything been done about this, and when will this be resolved?
a couple of sites tried to sign up with http://www.xoom.com and their signup
has a word verification, and no alternative to this, the same with
http://www.google.com to sign up for google groups or google mail, and
http://www.yahoogroups.com have not fixed this problem either when signing
up for new groups.
so let us try to move the companies to try to resolve this problem for us
all.
cheers Marvin.
From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 8:15AM
Subject: Re: word verification
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Depends on your goal. What are you trying to prevent or block?
My friend has a web site (blog) where the comment form says:
"Please enter 'revisgreat' without the quotes."
And it has a text box.
So far it's blocked 100% of automatic blog comment spam.
What's your goal, what's the problem you're trying to solve, and how
much inconvenience are you willing to impose on your users in order to
solve the problem?
--Kynn
On 2/9/06, Cinnamon Melchor < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Marvin and others --
>
> A colleague has a client that's requesting something like word
> verification, and some of the brainstorming alternatives were:
From: Cinnamon Melchor
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 8:30AM
Subject: Re: word verification
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Marvin and others --
A colleague has a client that's requesting something like word
verification, and some of the brainstorming alternatives were:
-- ask the user a general knowledge question to proceed, something
like "what is the US president's last name?" or "what color is the
sky?", the thought being that it would be pretty difficult for bots to
get around this but pretty straightforward to a human user.
-- randomly display a sequence of words and ask the user to input the
first character from each word. e.g,
The
Dog
Jumped
Up
user enters: TDJU
-- audio cues wherein the user listens to a .wav or similar file and
enters what he hears as the validation word.
What do y'all think about the validity of these approaches?
Cheers,
Cinnamon Melchor
User Research and Creative Design
Sapient
From: Cinnamon Melchor
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 8:45AM
Subject: Re: word verification
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> What's your goal, what's the problem you're trying to solve, and how
> much inconvenience are you willing to impose on your users in order to
> solve the problem?
All good questions to relay to the team. It's a registration form for
ebilling; since it's not my client, I have to assume that automatic
registration from bots is a known problem rather than a hypothetical
one (though what a bot registration would accomplish I don't know) and
that it's enough of a problem that they do need to impose some level
of inconvenience on humans -- thus me being curious about the
acceptability and accessibility of the alternatives they proposed.
Cinnamon
From: Carol E. Wheeler
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 10:15AM
Subject: RE: word verification
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I am an 'average' user and frankly I have often had problems with
Captcha because the font is not clear. Is it caps, or not, mixed? More
than once I have had to make it generate another 'word' simply because I
could tell what they wanted.
Carol E. Wheeler
American Library Assoc
Washington Office
202.628.8410 v
202.628.8424
From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 10:30AM
Subject: word verification
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Amen.
CAPTCHA is almost always user hostile at the expense of convenience
for the developer and/or site user.
Hostile to ALL users. We just notice the hostility more blatantly when
users with specific needs are shut out.
--Kynn
From: ben morrison
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 10:45AM
Subject: Re: word verification
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On 2/9/06, marvin hunkin < = EMAIL ADDRESS REMOVED = > wrote:
> Hi.
> what has happened with the nfb and kurt trying to get the big net
> companies to make their signup or signin more easily for us vips.
This blog post maybe of interest to you:
http://www.standards-schmandards.com/index.php?2005/01/01/11-captcha
ben
From: Glenda Watson Hyatt
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 11:00AM
Subject: RE: word verification
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Marvin and others --
A colleague has a client that's requesting something like word
verification, and some of the brainstorming alternatives were:
<SNIP>
Check the upcoming issue of the AccessibleContent Magazine
<www.accessiblecontent.com> for an article on CAPTCHAs. CAPTCHAs are
gotchas for many people.
Good luck!
Cheers,
Glenda
Glenda Watson Hyatt, Principal
Soaring Eagle Communications
Accessible websites. Accessible content. Accessible solutions.
www.webaccessibility.biz
Watch for my autobiography I'll Do It Myself due out November 2006! - visit
www.BooksbyGlenda.com
--
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From: Kynn Bartlett
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 11:15AM
Subject: word verification
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A few more specific comments:
* Anything requiring cultural knowledge may shut out users from other
cultures or with cognitive impairments.
* Anything requiring spelling may shut out users with dyslexia, motor
function impairments that make typing hard.
* Anything with just audio and video shuts out deaf-blind users.
* Anything with logic puzzles shuts out some cognitively impaired
users, and impatient users.
Most of these suggestions are workable but shut out users. The
question is what's worth it.
If it is a financial/ecommerce transaction why not just run a credit
card auth at order time to validate them?
--Kynn
From: Jukka K. Korpela
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 11:45AM
Subject: Re: word verification
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On Thu, 9 Feb 2006, Kynn Bartlett wrote:
> CAPTCHA is almost always user hostile at the expense of convenience
> for the developer and/or site user.
Indeed. The same applies to E-mail address munging.
> Hostile to ALL users. We just notice the hostility more blatantly when
> users with specific needs are shut out.
The most common captchas discriminate against the blind, the visually
impaired, and people with difficulties in seeing patters of characters in
a messy setting (hey, that's me!). Suggesting an alternate route to such
people means telling they're secondary people, and I wouldn't be surprise
if the quality of the service corresponded to this.
The captchas that are meant to overcome such difficulties, by asking
"simple" questions, discriminate against people with cognitive
difficulties, or with limited knowledge - about the specific subject aream
which might be something US-centered or otherwise culturally exclusive.
Briefly, anything that is difficult enough to keep advanced robots away
will keep potentially millions or billions of people away.
Yet, the problem remains, even if we recognize that most proposed
solutions create worse problems that they purport to solve. Anything on
the web can be used, one way or another, by any person, or any dog, or any
robot. How do we filter out the data coming from robots (and from dogs,
and from people who behave worse than dogs)?
This is quite a puzzle. But any solution that requires the user to prove
he is human by his ability to see or to know things or to do things is
bound to discriminate against many people. There is no _single_ external
activity that is necessary and sufficient to classify a being as human.
--
Jukka "Yucca" Korpela, http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/
From: Austin, Darrel
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 12:00PM
Subject: RE: word verification
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> A colleague has a client that's requesting something like
> word verification, and some of the brainstorming alternatives were:
It really doesn't need to be that complex. If one MUST use a captcha,
make it as simple as possible, and random, to keep the bots away.
I typically suggest something like:
Enter the letter 'd' for verification:
-Darrel
From: Glenda Watson Hyatt
Date: Thu, Feb 09 2006 12:15PM
Subject: RE: word verification
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Jukka wrote:
This is quite a puzzle. But any solution that requires the user to prove
he is human by his ability to see or to know things or to do things is
bound to discriminate against many people. There is no _single_ external
activity that is necessary and sufficient to classify a being as human.
Glenda adds:
I agree. In writing the article on CAPTCHAs, the only interim solution that
I came up with is to offer a variety of CAPTCHAs and, hopefully, the user
will be able to use one of them. Admittedly, this is very clumsy, but it
may have to do until a "more accessible" solution is developed. Ideally we
wouldn't need this darn things.
I find it ironic that we need tests to differentiate between computers and
humans when its humans who are developing these robots to act like humans.
Can't "we" simply stop doing this to ourselves???
Cheers,
Glenda
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