Slashdot Mirror
Anti-Spam Webforms Leave Out The Blind
geekee writes "An article on CNET claims that a technique whereby a user enters a code word displayed in an image in order to register for a service such as an e-mail account discriminates against the blind. Advocacy groups for the blind are even hinting at lawsuits against companies using this practice. A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters. Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test."
Monitors discriminate against the blind. They should be banned.
Audio wouldn't help the deaf mutes.
Hellen keller is scooting around in her grave...maybe even rolling over.
So we expect that a computer is going to be smart enough to figure out it needs to find a sound file, go to the link, determine what letters it needs, and put it in the appropriate box?
My Journal - 1,337 fans and countin
What are the "interesting issues surrounding the Turing test?" I don't think generating a poor quality recording of some random word has anything to do with useful artificial intelligence.
Seriously. What problem are these methods hoping to solve?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
We should get rid of Road signs - they discriminate against the blind as well.
The Turing test should hold true on audio. Anyone ever tried using voice recognition software/speech-to-text software? Even if it was a computer listening in with this software, there's a good chance that the computer is going to get it wrong anyway.
IAALS.
No matter what you do to improve conditions for a large group of people, some much smaller group will still be inconvenienced or have their level of inconvenience slightly raised. In this case, we have a very important tool used to fight spammers in their quest to sign up for email accounts automatically. Billions of pieces of spam float around the 'net every day. How many blind people are there?
This reminds me of new 25-cent public bathrooms tested by New York City awhile back. You paid 25 cents to go use it, and it cleaned itself and smelled great and so on. Then people in wheelchairs complained they couldn't use them (because they were too small), and were being discriminated against. So, the company made a larger version. Except now, you had bums popping in a quarter, and having a free room for the night. More lawsuits ensued.
When will it stop?
It seems like all you would need to do is have an option that has a voice clearly enunciate the text, and you'd be good. Record all the possible letters, combine 'em on the fly, and play them for the user.
Of course, voice recognition could be used by bots... but I expect OCR to start thwarting the visual trick as well.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Why not use a voice spelling letters or saying a word to give everyone equal opportunity? Should not be too difficult.
My ass. This is the opposite of the Turning Test, and has so little to do with it that it shouldn't have even been mentioned. Just some dumb ass reporter trying to appear erudite.
I know a lot of Domain Name Registrars use these methods on their web-based whois forms, to prevent spammers from harvesting email addresses and domains via automated scripts.
Yes, free email has no purpose for blind people!
Hotmail's one has a link "click here if you can't see the image" which then proceeds to read you the letters via an audio file which you can then type in.
Although or blind and deaf, you're still out of luck.
network solutions has begun using this system just for whois queries. the place they want you to get the code is graphic.
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
Wall....Wall....Intruder's leg....Intruders stomache....Intruder's head
*BANG*
Are you trolling? I know two blind people, and they both use email to communicate, unassisted.
Actually, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure you're trolling.
It's probably worth pointing out that the /. account signup employs just such a technique.
And yes, I can see how this can be viewed as discriminatory, but the problem of devising an alternative is far from trivial.
Jurisprudence Fetishist Gets Off On A Technicality --theonion.com
The enemy is now taking cover behind the blind. The battle gets complicated.
Hope the judge is sensible enough to throw these cases out.
There are two kinds of egotists: 1) Those who admit it 2) The rest of us
I hope TicketMaster is the first target, since the government never bothers to deal with them as a monopoly. I can't seem to find anyone interested in the fact that they routinely charge more than 10% above the ticket price which is a violation of Pennsylvania state statutes. Oh, silly me: they're just part of the entertainment cabal.
Some things just aren't meant to be used by the blind.
Yes, but that set of things would not logically include Hotmail, Yahoo! Instant Messaging, and Verisign's registration database, which are the specific websites that are listed in this article as using image-based anti-bot techniques...
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
And let me just say I'm profoundly sorry about the subject line of this post.
--
Why do I get the feeling that when all is said and done, a handful of lawyers will be able to go out and buy yachts, but blind people won't be any better off?
that slashdot does the exact same thing when you try to get an account.
rminds me of this site
DO NOT WRITE IN THIS SPACE
okSo you are saying that blind people are not allowed to vote for the All Star Game (first site to came to mind when I read this). That doesn't seem very fair to me. Baseball is a great example of something that blind people can enjoy almost as much as a sighted person. Your analogy of a car is silly because you wouldn't expect a blind person to drive in the first place. You would expect them to surf the web, listen to baseball, and vote on the All Star game.
Now I understand that baseball is not life-threatening but it is just an example. I think you would feel differently if you or someone you loved was blind.
Huh, I thought this had already been solved? I was reading about this issue on CNN's similar story last week, and they mentioned the outcry from the blind and mute community over this issue. However, they also said Microsoft had already come up for a solution with regards to hotmail (M$'s free internet based e mail service) by simply not applying the test to the blind. WindowsXP checks to see if a Braille translator is hooked up to your computer, and relays this through your .NET passport to Hotmail. If it is, you don't have to go through that mess.
Sounds like a good solution to me! Besides, if they do this for the blind, and use that audio test thing instead, the deaf will be all over them.
Consensual sex is boring.
I understand that part, but why can't the image be in a nice anti-aliased Times New Roman? If someone is so determined to scrape the information, then they'll pay someone to sit and type numbers that flash across their screen - in other words, they'll hire a human OCR to do it. This does nothing but make it harder than necessary for everybody else without actually solving anything.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Hello, I am your seeing eye monkey from bonzai buddy, I can help you read the text off of the screen that you need to register for your e-mail account.
Would you like to.
1. have the selection recognized with ocr, and read to you.
2. send your personal information to us, along with the new e-mail account so we can send it to spammers.
3. Profit!@!@
(except in soviet russia where the OCR owns us)
Remember that you are unique, just like everybody else.
If you ever try to turn off images, you'll see that ALT tags are sadly lacking, making many sites impossible for blind to navigate...
I don't think it's bad will, but rather that seeing is such an integral part of the normal experience they just don't even think about it. I normally wouldn't.
If not image recognition, they need something to prevent mass registering bots... Hashcash perhaps, that should work even for the blind.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
friends to read things to them every now and again? How often do you sign up for an email account, or submit something to a search engine?
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test.
Well, if the word displayed in an image serves a a turing test, and if a blind person is unable to pass said test, it can only mean...
Blind people are robots!
As we all know, robots are not protected under the Americans with Disabilities Act, and thus have no standing in court. I don't think these companies have anything to worry about. Oh yeah, IANAL. In fact, you'd be better off with the Chewbacca defense than this one.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball(TM)
They had that article posted here a few weeks ago about the honeypots for harvesting.
I seem to recall that NONE of the graphical email addresses were harvested. Is it just me, or would it be a BIG waste of CPU time to harvest every graphic off of every page that a spider encounters?
So what would you prefer to do as a solution?
Remove the test altogether and let spammers have their way with free email accounts? If anything, why not create an e-mail service just for the blind that requires some other type of verification that they can use, but will still stop spammers?
If we know the target language, then you could produce a challenge based on a sentence. Say something like
...] verb [location] [time]." ... as long as you've got a big enough dictionary that can fill in the blanks, generating these messages as a challenge should be a cinch. an encrypted string in the Subject (which is fairly dependably returned in the reply) could be used to identify the particular message, and the answer could be looked up
"Thirteen red small dogs went to the zoo."
What size were they? (to which the answer would be "small")
You could mix and match questions and adjectives to keep spammers on their toes. The only drawback is that this is only effective for as long as you have a bigger dictionary system than the spammers. Using a larger sentence or paragraph with more complexities should help.
"[count] [color] [size] [age] object [and [count] [color] [size] [age] [object]
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Nice job, you just gave them a case to argue. Now they will order the websites to provide a garbled sound file speaking the letters in a voice so annoying that no speech reconition software will dare parse.
By the way i'm left handed and i'm STILL waiting for my keypad to jump to the right side. (even though I think left handers have a superior setup for gaming, mouse offset with the keypad)
humans cost money. scripts cost power and bandwidth (ie, nothing)
turn up the jukebox and tell me a lie
Just make a checkbox saying "I am legally blind under the Americans with Disabilities Act". If a computer checks it, it will be against the DMCA, and a lawsuit can follow.
Using audio, ask the user a question that is hard for a computer to interpret.
What is the first vowel in your last name? (leave blank for none)
If you added all the digits in you phone number up what would be their sum?
I am sure some text to speech software could produce good text, and someone could parse the sentence, but if you randomized the questions enough it should deter most automated attacks.
Then again these type of questions may offend those who just can't figure out the answers.
EA David Gardner -"... but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun."
Yes, because the majority of the content on Slashdot, and all other sites, is visual. Oh, wait, it's all text, just like this!
Has anyone here worked on any alternatives? The report indicates that the Microsoft sound-based alternative was totally non-functional. Is that even a worthwhile path to work on?
Perhaps some sort of text challenge/response scenario that would require an explicit understanding of the challenge part: "Take the second-to-last letter of each word from the below text, reverse the order and write them capitalized" . With a wide enough range of such challenges, spambots would be out of luck.
I'm illiterate.
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
Spammers allegedly make hundreds of thousands of dollars. I imagine that a human making $6.00/hour could decode several thousand images like:
4 5 7
9 a 1 b c
z h 4 q l
per shift. How many faked accounts would you need, anyway? Do spammers really go through 10,000 per day each?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
damn blindoers
It discriminates against people such as yourself.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
WindowsXP checks to see if a Braille translator is hooked up to your computer, and relays this through your .NET passport to Hotmail. If it is, you don't have to go through that mess.
And will be immediately unsolved as soon as a spammer purchases and hooks up a Braille translator to his computer.
Mozilla's automatic password feature can't handle dynamic captchas, creating a new login for each captcha value. You have to turn the feature off for sites that use captchas and type in username and password each time. Very annoying for the terminally lazy who have got used to login autocompletion.
Says who? It's primarly a digital media. And digital information (text, etc.) can be represented in any number of ways, a monitor is just one of them (think braille lines, text-to-speech software, etc.)
Much like driving.
Yes, but in the physical world, blind people can still walk. And many cities do take action to make traffic easyer for blind people (pedestrian traffic lights that buzz, elevator buttons with braille markings, etc)
OK... So I'm blind.. Make the website talk to me so I can find the "code word"
I'm deaf.... Now what?
How about that website doesn't get business from those who are handicapped (is that still the kosher PC term?)
I don't force sites that don't have SSL to use SSL so I can use them... I JUST DON'T USE THEM...
Everything isn't made to fit everyone..
My butcher isn't going to start a produce section for vegetarians
My barber isn't going to start a hair replacement facilty for bald people (not a bad business idea though)?
and My office isn't gonna start using Linux because I say so (had to throw that one in)
I don't believe any of these websites are "public services" so if they don't wish to cater to this specific demographic (is that more PC or less?) then they simply don't get their business. If my website sells tools that help those who are disabled use the web you'll damn well bet my website is able to be viewed by their machines. If I'm selling video game systems, I dunno but, probably not....
I remember the good old days of BBSing where it required a photocopy of your driver's license or some other picture ID (submitted via snailmail) in order subscribe to more lucrative services.
!@#$% whole-grain cereal. When I want fiber, I eat some wicker furniture. - G. Carlin
"A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters."
Can't you just ask a question, like:
how much is 2 + 2?
what number comes after 10?
type in a 4 letter word beginning with "k".
okay, the problem would be that each website will need to come with its own set of questions. but we can have few templates where you just substitute new parameters each time.
I am sure, no software is intelligent enough to crack all these questions. by the time, the software becomes intelligent enough to answer these questions, we can come up with something else. it is cat and mouse game except that mouse keeps winning.
Wow, there are a lot of foolish comments being modded up early. The idea behind this is that blind people need access to the same service as the non-blind. That doesn't mean you are required to make email addresses readable to the blind, per se, but it does require you to have a method of sending email (or verifying a code or what have you) that the blind can access as well. So, in the case of email, you could provide an email form instead of a mailto link. In the case of paypal's "read this number" to verify that a human is part of the process, you could have a phone number that people can talk to a real operator.
However, if your service relies upon discriminating practices in order to survive, then you are quite simply wrong. Note, I have no close friends or relatives who are in need of these laws, but I do believe it to be wrong to discriminate. Put in a little effort, people, it's not that hard.
=Brian
There is nothing so good that someone, somewhere, will not hate it.
Honestly, I don't see what the big deal is. Some things just aren't meant to be used by the blind. What's next? Will they sue Ford or GM because the speedometer of car isn't audible?
This isn't anything to do with the blind at all, and never was - it's about lawyers smelling a way to use someone else's misfortune to make themselves a quick buck. So much easier to chase a blind man than an ambulance, see.
As an aside, if these so-called advocacy groups have a better solution, let's hear it. All they are saying is that they'll block one of the few solutions that does exist, which isn't very constructive. That is further evidence that they're only in it for the money.
Yeah, I read the article about the audio solution, but the article also says it doesn't work nearly as well, and it wasn't thought up by one of these lawyers anyway, but by their intended victims.
I was attempting to buy some concert tickets from a large, evil corporation recently. The letters were so contorted that I simply COULD NOT read it ... I got several friends' guesses on what the word was, and each opinion was different. If the problem is really so bad as to necessitate these word games, it might be time to try a different tactic.
For instance, couldn't you simply direct the user to perform a few simple tasks? (e.g. select the bubble with the picture of the fish next to it, then type the last name of the president of the united states in the second box from the left) I doubt AI would be able to cope with as system like this, especially if you had varying combinations of tests. If you had a variety of these tests, you could also make some that accomodated the disabled, too.
Next I think deaf people should sue government imposed tariffs on blank CDs; after all they won't use them to record stolen music.
They wont be buying them either..
Braille Screens.
The extra words ("The secret pass-phrase") would be very hard for a computer to deal with, and they would vary slightly from site to site.
Think of it this way. These companies are giving away free e-mail service. Sure, there's pop-up ads and banners all over the place, but will the blind actually follow the ads/banners? No.
So basically, you want a company offering a free service to go out of their way, spend thousands of dollars and man-hours to create a system for the blind that won't benefit their company? Sure, it would be nice if humanity was that kind, but its not.
This could be something good for OSS to work on. I mean, while improving security and stability is very good. Finding a truly good solution that would defeat spam bots and yet allow access to actual humans (even those with disabilities) would be more than just useful, it would be good for mankind. Besides, in the wake of the Linux on Xbox or else situation, the good PR couldn't hurt.
Slashdot...it's like Fox news, but without the biased sl...or maybe not.
The blind don't deserve to see anything, hence that is why they are born blind or otherwise.
:)
Can a blind person feel this bestiality picture of a girl and a dog?
I'm joking, of'course you can. I hope the webforum moderators recognize your plight and bend some of their webspace to tailor to the handicapt of which are unwilling^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hunable to help themselves.
I sort of assumed there was such a thing all along. Something like those "pinpression" toys with all the parallel pins that you can push on and make an imprint of your hand, only driven by actuators. Why wouldn't this work?
(Hold on...after a little Googling, I found this instance of the exact thing I'm proposing. Go and buy it, blind people! And not just for anti-spam graphics; as with any new medium, just imagine the pr0n possibilities.)
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
There are a lot of "x discriminates against the blind" posts already, but keep the web is supposed to be universal.
Imagine being blind, never being able to experience the majority written works, and then discovering the Web: a huge body of knowledge that can instantly be transformed into voice or braille.
Then imagine discovering that most of that has been obfuscated so thoroughly by shitty authoring tools or lazy developers that it too is useless to you.
Put yourself in the shoes of your fellow human being once in a while.
The US Army: promoting democracy through unquestioned obedience
In Canada our goverment is addressing this for all goverment sites . Its a pain in the ass as a contractor but everything you do for the goverment of canada "has to" (I dont think they check) validate against the w3c standards , have descriptave alt tages and quite a few other things.
Fuck 'em
What you are saying is the exact reason that evolution isn't a "livable" worldview. If evolution were true, then you are correct, and we should weed those people out because they are hurting our "gene pool" as you said. It's just common sense which any rational evolutionist would admit, although would probably have issues with it, because not many people can really be that hard-hearted.
But if the universe was created by God and if what the Bible says is true about people who have handicaps of some sort (that they will glorify God because of it), then there is reason to love them and have compassion upon them.
Captcha's are a *generic* means of differentiating a human user from a 'bot, which is not inherently a vision thing. Not providing an accomodation for the vision-impaired is not just lazy, but specifically discriminatory, though presumably out of ignorance rather than malice. In short, there's no excuse for such discrimination.
There's no reason a user couldn't opt whether to use an audio or visual captcha, and therefore accomodate either visual or auditory impairments.
And YES, there are various experimenters developing better and better recognition algorithms such that it is a bit of an arms race. Creating a good captcha is not quite as easy as one might think. Check this paper for some discussion on the subject.
Would this work? Make a database of answers that would be simple for a human to answer but hard for a machine to parse.
"What day comes after Wednesday?"
"Will you get wet if you stand in the rain?"
"How many fingers does the average person have?"
"What is that hair-like stuff on the top of most people's heads called?"
"Will you burn yourself if you put your hand in a fire?"
"Is snow cold?"
Make thousands of these questions, don't use cultural, historical, geographical, or trivia questions. Make them so easy, all but those too simple minded to be signing agreements in the first place can answer them, but varied enough that a machine can't. Retire questions frequently, and use many different ways of wording the same question.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
$6/hour?
Hahahahaha! No, you outsource to some developing nation (that has IT resources) and you pay the poor workers $6/MONTH!
How did Helen Keller break her arm?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It's bad enough that the blind get all the good parking spaces, but now we can't even fight spam because some blind guy doesn't like the tools used? Time to strike down the Americans with Disabilities Law as the flawed law it is. Perhaps someone needs to admit that a disability is just that, a disability, and however unfortunate the rest of the entire world should not be disabled to accomodate the person with a disability.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
They don't have to be "massively obfuscated" to be difficult for blind people to use.
Do you think that there are OCRs in modern webbrowsers for the blind? Besides, OCRs today are made to work with a much higher DPI than is present in those little images usually, and encoding things in jpeg, as these images do, screws up OCRs even worse.
Also, it's to hard for the browser to figure out where there might be some text it could read, and where there is just plain picture.
It's a lot easier for the distributor to just put up a randomly generated audio file to go with that randomly generated picture than it is for the blind to have to do such a convoluted and ineffective workaround.
This is an area that Linux advocates should be able to get behind. After all, we, the minority, have been trying for years to get hardware manufacturers to support us.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Blind people can't see spam anyway. So why is this even an issue?
Too fucking bad. Get your friend to sign you up. Boom one time deal.
Seriously. What's next? Brail cars? Audio assistance in fighter jets?
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Oh yeah, porn sites discriminate against the blind too you know! Ever tried to get off on a mouse-over image desc?
What color is the sky? -- valid answer: blue
How many people take the job of president of the US at a time? -- valid answer: 1 or one
etc.
The problem I see with this is that the answers would need to be varied enough that a program couldn't simply brute-force its way in. Also, you would need to have the dictionary available in multiple languages for some sites. So long as the questions are garbeled a bit and spoken fairly quickly, it should be difficult for a program to decifer them. At the very least, it would greatly slow the programs down, given the amount of CPU usage typically needed for voice recognition.
Anti-spam webforms not only leave out the blind, but anyone who uses a non-graphical browser (like Lynx.) Similar issues abound regarding alt tags and graphics.
There are other challenge response systems that can be used in place of graphics. I think the only reason that graphics are being used is because the designers haven't given any real thought to users who don't use graphics. This is the same kind of mental blind spot that has people using javascript and flash on major sites.
I guess the blind community finally had enough - a lot of major sites apparently are not following the recommended accessibility guidelines set down by the W3. This is their version of the stick, to convince companies (and lazy designers/programmers) that ignoring them is a bad idea.
Try seeing things from their angle. This world is built for people who can see perfectly, hear perfectly, walk perfectly, and talk perfectly. This goes double for the technological world. There are more "imperfect" people out there than you think. Small little things which aren't the same in you are me which we take for granted which cause a great amount of difficulty for someone else because no one even thought to ask them about their condition or what they could do to make things easier for them.
To give you an example, this technical feature also discriminates against the color blind as well, and 10% of Americans are color blind in some fashion. 10% of americans. Not so insignificant any more huh?
Some great information on accessibility is located here, and you can probably find plenty of papers on accessibility on google, but if you need to go looking for them, you obviously aren't disabled enough to be able to look for them yourself.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Since registering for an email account is typically a one-time thing (unless you're a spambot, that is), making a toll-free phone number available to register manually (i.e., by talking to someone) might be a solution.
Costs wouldn't be too bad, as most people who are able to use the image-based form would do so for the convenience, while those who can't would have an alternative interface, and the inconvenience would be minimized by the fact that they only need to call once.
Speakers discriminate against the deaf.
--
This is not discriminatory. And speaking of that, why does every group, sect, division, race, gender, species, think that anything that isn't designed with them in mind is discriminatory? There are simply too many types of people, environments, ethics, laws, and other variables for every system to work equally, or even adequately for every person.
If I were to provide a service (even a paying one) of some sort (for example a dog wash) but then require that any customer that wants to use my service and pay me for it must hop once on their left legg as a way of verifying that they are in fact a biped and not a snake in a human disguise (just go with it). . . this would clearly be discriminatory against people missing their left legg. But that doesn't mean that I am some how liable financially or legally! I just have a clumsy authentication system and need to improve it. If I don't, then the left legged people of my town will go somewhere else to get their dog washed.
robi
Just have an audio clip that asks a simple question. For example, what is 1+1?
The user can then just type in "two" and get access. Even if a bot could successfully translate the audio into text, it won't be answering the question (unless it defaults to "calc" when it translates).
P.S. I know...this would discriminate against the stupid, but so does everything else in our society. That's why I'm s-m-r-t!
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
If the services are free, what exactly do these companies owe to these people? What argument can be made that giving away something free comes with strings attached that everyone has to be able to use it?
So blind people need to get someone to help them type in a jumbled word ONCE to get an account, big deal.
Just because most of the world isnt like you doesnt mean the world owes you something. All you people who start lawsuits over free services you cant use need to get a life and stop trying to ruin other peoples.
Try installing some text-to-speech software and reading slashdot.
I'm sure that will go over well. It's a clusterfuck as a visual medium, imagine it as read by Dr. Sbaitso...
I am left almost speechless by this stupidity. I mean haven't these people ever heard of "...you can't please everyone all of the time ..."
:)
If they really want to be able to use email and read news sites then they should not have been born blind!! Unless of course you were not born blind and by some horrific accident you were left sightless then well you should just commit suicide and let us normal people get on with or Spam control efforts.
And as long as we are on the subject, how do blind people read the screen at the ATM machines?
"A synonym is a word you use when you can't spell the word you first thought of." - Burt Bacharach
then type the last name of the president of the united states in the second box from the left
If half the populace can't even identify their home state on a map (or whatever that stat is...), I think it is totally unfair to assume they would know the name of the president!
</sarcasm>
Is speech recognition so good now that sound would have to be played back from inside a '73 Pinto at the bottom of a swimming pool to keep a computer from parsing it?
Years ago, I told my Powermac 660AV "Computer, open window", and it shut down instead.
Granted, it was the only computer on the market that could do speech recognition thanks to a builtin DSP, and the integration with the Macintosh environment was superb- but it still would do the most amusing things.
Please help metamoderate.
Nobody has mentioned that the Internet is not inaccessible not only to the blind but very often to the more fortunate ones who can see. This is because many companies decide to make their content IE only even if it works with other browsers (just checks what the browser sends). this one for example
There are also your overloaded flash sites that can be impossible to manage.
I assume that the blind use text-to-speach for browsing. Can flash content be used with text-to-speach technology? I doubt it.
There are so many bad sites out there that this problem , however true, seems like a drop in the ocean.
Slashdot Sig. version 0.1alpha. Use at your own risk.
"This is your audio clue. You will use the third letter in elephant, the fourth letter in cheese, and the eighth letter in consequences, and the fifth number in eight-nine-nine-five-six"
text-to-speech that, freaks
Add this to the website:
If you are blind, click here.
Yeah. With apologies to View Askew:
There is a $100 bill in the middle of an intersection. To the north, there is santa claus. To the south, there is the easter bunny. To the west is God. To the east is you. Who will get to the money first?
Answer: you. Why?
BECAUSE ALL OF THE OTHER CHOICES ARE FIGMENTS OF YOUR FUCKING IMAGINATION.
Poorly thought-out flamebait at that. Off the top of my head. Stephen Hawking? Stevie Wonder? Beethoven? We're evolving mentally now. Do try and keep up.
Well, i know several persons here (Argentina) that could do it for 3 u$s an hour, with their own cable internet connection. (residential cable connection is about 25 u$s a month).
Everybody has a purpose in life, maybe mine is to lurk in slashdot.
It's only primarily visual because it's become so. It's not by its nature visual. You can make web sites that are very accessible by blind people, or you can make them completely unusable by blind people. The most common product to screw up handicapped access is also reviled by many sighted people: Flash animations. I'm sure many people would cheer if all-flash websites were outlawed.
If anybody is interested in finding out more about these spambot "turing tests", check out http://www.captcha.net/.
I seem to remember one of their earlier tests involved determining which word didn't belong in a particular phrase. They would give you something like "The girl went to the mall to buy a giraffe" and the answer would be "giraffe". This sort of test could be given either visually or aurally, and would require a lot of NLP resources to crack (would have to determine part of speech and some amount of the syntactic structure). This kind of system might be the answer.. theoretically it would be accessible to all english speakers, blind or deaf.
Free Mail Lawyer: Spam sucks. Keep it off of our network.
Spammer's Lawyer: We're here to protect the rights of the blind. Why are you out to hurt blind people?
--- I'm Green Hornet's sidekick not Inspector Clouseau's!
>> Some things just aren't meant to be used by the blind.
And who gets to decide what that is? You?
No thanks.
Instead of whining, why doesn't the fabled open source community get busy and code something.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
That said, I have mixed feelings about this lawsuit. On the one hand, I know where the blind people are coming from: they want an equal opportunity to use popular websites, just as everyone else (with a computer) is able to. On the other hand, being blind means you live under a different set of circumstances, so not everything is possible. It's just a fact of life when you're blind.
I think a lawsuit is the last thing that should occur; rather, people should focus on developing new technology that assists the blind and allows them to gain equal access to websites. There should be more standards that dictate accessibility, and the browsers should do all they can as well.
After all, the Internet is a text-based medium at its core.
!sresworb ypparc tsniaga etanimircsid txet srawkcaB
Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test.
I thought the Turing Test involves a human interegator and a human or computer subject? Since when did registration forms become interegators and spam machines intelligent? Someone shoot me please.
>A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the >point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters.
Why? Isn't the current system just meant to make things a little bit harder for an automatic system. Recognizing some words made out of computer fonts from the image isn't that hard unless picture is seriously garbled.
"Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test.""
no it doesn't.
You just make a call to a database for each letter, before building the page with the code, then insert that sound into the web page.
I did this in 1997.
If anybodu wants to know how to do it, send me an email and I'll quote you my rates.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
IOW, the ends justify the means. This is dangerous thinking, and IMHO, anyone thinking along these lines is an absolute menace to society. When one starts thinking that the ends justify the means, you get into cases where it becomes acceptable to seize the property of others for the greater good of society, or invade a sovereign nation to depose a dictator because a hypothetical democracy would be better for the people there, or to ban all computing devices to eradicate the scourge of digital copyright infringement. People of this view are not deserving of the benefits of society, for this manner of thinking is antithetical to any and all social forms.
From the post:
A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters
By the way... The keypad is already on the right side... (which I agree is great for gaming, I'm left-handed too). Now if they would make left-handed mice and joysticks...
I bet most of the spammers won't recognize braille
Anybody who cannot see a garbled word graphic also cannot see a banner ad. For one of the sites I'm working on, that's enough to make them persona non grata on that site...
They wont be buying them either..
Since they couldn't possibly have data to save.
I know a lot of Domain Name Registrars use these methods on their web-based whois forms, to prevent spammers from harvesting email addresses and domains via automated scripts.
This type of system is so useless. The fact is, anyone who can write a script to do this will be smart enough to build a linux box.
whois is a command line utility!
I'm sure going to miss these days, where I can just put in my name, address, and credit card info to purchase products online. Having to answer a quiz for every purchase will probably drive me back offline... until the practice is adopted there.
Poorly thought-out response at that.
Stephen Hawking - diagnosed with ALS *after* obtaining his Ph.D., and doctors still don't have any solid evidence linking ALS to genetic causes. Even after ALS took effect, Hawking *supported himself*, which is the key principle here - he didn't sue anyone or demand handouts from anyone else. Try again.
Stevie Wonder - Wrote a few catchy tunes. Supported himself. Try again.
Beethoven - Began going deaf around the middle of his life. Zero indication that the cause was genetic. Supported himself. Try again.
Challenge reponse systems only work when there's a human at both ends; there's plenty of people I know that complain about not being able to get onto a mailing list because they/their service use such a system.
AC comments get piped to
While I can see the points being made that you cant change everything to suit a fairly small (in comparison) group of people. Perhaps alot of the ignorant /.ers could also stop moaning about sites being IE only etc etc...after all, who cares about the small number (in comparison) of people who dont use IE? I could make my sites compatible, but the numbers that cant access it are not worth my while either.
Laptop Reviews
mod this up...
I'm serious man, mod this up.
I can't mod out of my left ear.
it can't be in the downloaded .html
sites like yahoo put it into a picture so auto-registering bots can't register.
if you just simply put out 'secret code' in the html, the bot could recognize that and register.
Runnin' On Empty
It discriminates against the dumb!
What, exactly, have you done to "improve the conditions" of people?
/. that your post is tagged with a score of 5 and labeled "interesting". "Embarrassing" would be more appropriate.)
And why do you presume that assisting sightless people will inconvenience the seeing?
(It's indicative of the smelly nature of
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
People who are mute are not necessarily blind but let us say they are for the moment. Such people already also have equipment which helps them overcome this problem. Again, they will either have Braille finger pads, or hearing enhancements.
"What if they don't have this?" you ask? "How did they get there in the first place?" I'd say back. Common sense says that they had to have some method to navigate the internet in the first place. That means that those methods can be used to do this as well.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
I remembember from my youth, that some warez site used a funky scheme where you would have to go dig the 6th letter of the 1st word on some page, then the 3rd letter of the 4th word on some other, and so on, to form a password.
So what if I provide a block of words, all ascii (easily readable by a braille reader) and then some instructions to pick letters from this and that word, all text, but then, no computer could reconstruct the password... I mean, eventually, you could program it to do text recognition, but then, throw some spelling mistakes in there.
See, software piracy ain't all that bad! IT HELPS THE BLINDS!
Also, I strongly believe that this is a problem to which the solution should be technical, and not legal. Let's not collectively get our panties in a bunch here, and instead of pointing fingers, and calling people/corp. names, let's just solve the TECHNICAL problem, rob a lawyer from it's meal, and be happy with it ever after.
Marriage is considered capital punishment for the theft of a goat in some third world countries...
Instead of using an audio file that says "A O P," use a file that says "The first letters of the words apple orange and pear."
as far as i know, a) sites like yahoo are private, much like the boy scouts, they can discriminate. they will get bad press for it, but oh well.
b) sites like yahoo could make a work around, you could call up for a username and password
c) the turing test only has to be passed once. i've never had to pass it a second time, once i'm a verified human being i'm verified... so why can't the blind have someone do it for them the first time? it would even be cheaper than hiring a lawyer, exspecially for a case they are going to loose.
Runnin' On Empty
It's that computer's can't resist the ol' shave and a haircut routine: Case in point: dun nun na na na.... TWO BITS! dun nun na na na.... TWO BITS! dun nun na na na.... TWO BITS!
There are other challenge response systems that can be used in place of graphics.
Give me an alternative that is accessable to the disabled and will still stop 100% of robotic registrations and I'll start listening.
I'm saying this in a genuine "I'd like to know" sense too, not just challenging you, because I can't think of any other systems to stop auto registers without using graphics (and don't say require an email address, the risk of spam is too great, and it can't be used to sign up for an email account itself anyway.)
I'm a moderator at phpBB, and if you give me a viable alternative I will suggest to the developers including it alongside/instead of graphic confirmation in the new version.
How many blind people do you think actually use a detectable braille machine attached to their computer? Not all of them I can assure you.
And as someone else mentioned, a spammer need only get a braille machine, and oh look at all those wide open doors.
No Comment.
Why not raise a few lawsuits against car manufacturers and city planners for not having audible instructions for the blind drivers to turn left, right, to brake or accelerate.
/. Anyway, back to the rant. Here are a few examples.
Come on people, nobody is deliberately trying to upset the blind, rather the embedded image schemes are there to stop the lowlife scum that automate the sign-up to free e-mail accounts just to spam from them. It's the same with the attempts to automate PayPal payments, etc. If these undesirables were dealt with, web services wouldn't have to resort to such technology in the first place.
Yes, it's awfully sad for the blind, but I'm sure on those infrequent occassions where they are subjected to such interfaces they could ask a friend or family member who can see to help, or perhaps they could use the phone, and if not, why not just give that company a miss and find another - "Vote with your wallets" and all that.
I doubt they've even tried to think up a real workable alternative.. oh no, it's easier to just litigate/screw some money out of honest companies, and what does that achieve? How about all the folk who were happily using service X sue the blind guy who sued service X into bankruptcy? It's pathetic, it really is.
I've not really thought this out very much, and hopefully someone will reply with a reasoned opposing view (great! let's hear it) rather than modding this a troll and that be it, but I'm just really irked at the way so many things these days are solved by clogging up the courts with needless litigation. I know I'm going off topic here but it's not like it doesn't happen every day on
e.g. The old 'beer vs women' sexist joke showed up on a company e-mail system, and a company gets sued for millions by some female employee, etc. Sticks and stones? Stop being so pathetic and just send back 'Cucumber vs men' or something.
Then there's the overweight fool that sues a fast food chain claiming he didn't know the food would make him fat and wins the case. "What do you mean if I consume more calories than I wear off I gain weight??" DUH! Eject that man from the courtroom!
Another well known one.. "Oh no that coffee you sold me, marked hot on the cup was hot! I spilt it on myself because I'm a dozy clot and burnt my little handypoo.. time to call my lawyer" and said person wins.
Nngh.. make love, not war (m'kay?). Maybe I should have stayed in bed.
--- Commission free trading & free stock up to $500 - use http://share.robinhood.com/kelvinp6
Bottom line is, what is the internet - a public place or a content provider? Because if it's a content provider, I see no basis for Southwest to get overturned. Newspapers don't have to include a CD-audio version in their distributions, do they?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
If the choice is more spam and blind accessibility, or less spam and the blind are left out, then as a society we ought to choose the former.
And as my proposal for a better solution is: "which of these things is not like the other", with some large secret DB of things and properties:
cat - animal, carnivore, mammal, three-letter-word
horse - animal, carnivore, mammal, five-letter-word
shark - animal, carnivore, five-letter-word
chair - furniture, seat, single-user, five-letter-word
couch - furniture, seat, multi-user, five-letter-word
desktop computer - gadget, single-user, two-word-phrase, office
server - gadget, multi-user, six-letter-word, office
keyboard - gadget, single-user, office, long-word
whisk - gadget, single-user, kitchen, five-letter-word
spoon - gadget, single-user, kitchen, five-letter-word
(whisk, keyboard, couch, horse): which one of these is not like the others? Keyboard is not a five-letter-word. What about (whisk, keyboard, couch, cat): A cat is an animal. (spoon, server, shark, whisk): All but whisk start with s.
Sure, bad guys could come up with their own DBs, but it will be tough to come up with the same set of attributes.
Ok...who let the Jesus-freak in?
I love that one. But I think it's
How did Helen Keller lose her hand?
I think the more interesting situation is not how to recognize a single human, but how to recognize the contribution of the human in the network of computers and humans.
What I mean with the visual spam test is that some spammers had put a person to the task of just looking at the letters and typing them it in. That way you could still automate the creation of mailboxes, with one tiny step left for a person to do. It slowed them down a little but now much, because in an Adam Smithian kind of way, they could produce 10 times more needles than before the division of labor ....
In the above story it is mentioned Turing test ... I think Turing test is valid only for a stand-alone device. If it is a networked device, then the notion of the Turing test has to be updated.
Here is an excerpt from a document that I wrote ... http://www.bubbleui.com/thesis/Invention%20disclos ure%20NCSU%20Sept%2025%202000.pdf
The notion that Turing proposed about determining Artificial Intelligence, emerging from ?computer bits,? has to be broadened in context of the "network bits" or "nits"? This is because of the human-nature derived unpredictability in the Human-Computer networks.
When we try to adapt the Turing Test to try to decide if the human-computer network can be said to be "thinking" as well as a human, we must pay special attention to the
Thus, we have to redefine the test to determine if the network is "intelligent."
To see a world in a grain of sand, and then to step back and see the beach where the sand lies
They wouldn't need to have these verification images, if mail servers would just implement SMTP authentication (or other such protections). I'm often surprised at how many SMTP servers are just open relays for anyone who knows the hostname.
-------
"In times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
but when you are blind, you have to live with you disability..
While I am for making reasonable accomodations (That is what the Americans with Disabilies Act calls for) for disabled, spam is an incredible problem and I dont think we should give up our best efforts at fighting it just because a few blind people are unable to gain access. The greater good of society is served by removing spam than letting it all flow in to make the blind minority happy.
Find a way around it.. get a friend who can see to fill out the form for you.. or call up the company that runs the webform and I bet they'd be eager to do it for you too
This is a classic security vs. usability tradeoff. It does not mean, ofcourse, that companies wouldn't like to do business with blind people. Instead of throwing away money to lawyers and starting lawsuits, it might be more productive to help think up possible solutions.
One solution could be to have offered goods or services also orderable through other means such as a voice response system. Blind people can use that instead; problem solved. (IANAL, but I take it that as long as a company enables everyone, sane, deaf, dumb or blind, to buy their goods in any reasonable way, they are in line with the law. IOW, I assume that companies are not forced to, let's say, enable deaf people to be able to buy through a voice-response system without using any additional tools, as long as they offer an alternative way to purchase the goods or services.)
I'm quite sure that in this case there is a relatively easy one (I must admit I did not RTFA - host is slashdotted). I am confident that a voice saying "twohundredeightysix-A-B-ninetythree" accompanied by background music, is just as safe as the graphical type-in-the-visible-letters-in-an-image method that is used now.
My karma ran over your dogma
Remove the test altogether and let spammers have their way with free email accounts?
Oh, geez, god forbid, not the spammers! *shudder*
Do yourself a favor, Thurston:
1. Get some decent spam filtering on your account and win back some of your time. I get over 175 spam messages a day; I see, maybe, three of them, and all I'm using is homegrown rules in KMail.
2. Regularly spend some time with a disabled person and win back some of your soul and dignity. You're making the rest of us "normal" people look bad by association...
Yahoo. MSN. insert-your-favourite-*free*-webmail-or-IM-service -here. All: FREE.
For crying out loud. How much money does a site have to spend to offer a FREE service? If someone wants to open up a hearing- or sight-impaired IM or webmail service that prevents spam from being delivered, then *go right ahead*. Why should the services mentioned (OK, most of them probably could afford to do something) be *forced* to do anything when they are offering stuff for free?
Some posts have stated that the impaired folks can choose to use services that manage to make it easier for them to exist on the Net and perform those types of activites. Why do we have to force anyone to do anything with their content when other folks can make choices of their own?
Other posts pointed out that some of us folks who are not using Idiotic Exploder are being discriminated aganist by various sights. Hello? Clue-impaired organizations? I *just* *don't* visit them. I chose a bank who'se web site was Mac, BSD and Linux friendly. I visit sites that actually render properly according to standards and I avoid Flash sites like the plague (mentioning Flash, are those sites next on the hit list? Quick everyone hide your Java applets, the Web Content Police are coming!)
Next thing we'll be told that we need to use only a certain select few color schemes and ensure our sites are spell-checked thoroughly before going live.
We're doomed, absolutely doomed, as a society.
Mind the gap...
....Deaf people are suing websites for their new audible anti-spam test.
First, blind people typically do not live alone. The OCR challenge can be answered by any slighted person, so they just have to call someone over to the computer who can read the blured word for them. Since this only has to be done once per site, it's not like this is an everyday event.
Second, if there really is nobody around, couldn't some charity set up a screen-reading service where the blind person could send a screenshot of the screen to have a person look at the word and send back the ascii text they need?
hey dumbass... the article is about BLIND PEOPLE not being able to READ TEXT FROM IMAGES.... the parent of your post suggests that the text should be in the webpage, but require some intelegence to determine what it is, which would limit robots and people like you from signing up, but not discriminate against blind people... and you suggest that they put the text into an image
Need a Catering Connection
Instead of a graphic word, why not an audio word that has to be typed in by the user?
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
Even more important than how blind people are inconvenienced, what about how mandatory image-recognition discriminates against people who use lynx?!?!
How much longer until we have to have bags of rocks tied around our necks and blinders on our eyes like in Harrison Bergeron?
This is pure nonsense. "Evolution" is not a moral system or a
"worldview;" it is a scientific theory explaining the origin and
development of species. You are claiming that one can or should not
accept evolution, because it dictates that we should do morally abhorrent
things (like killing off blind people) in order to improve our gene pool.
This is just false; the theory of evolution does not require any such
thing. Evolution describes a biological process; it does not dictate
human behavior. Genetics tells us that one way to get rid of hemophilia,
for example, is to sterilize all hemophiliacs. But we don't do that,
because we find that morally unacceptable; instead, we look for other
solutions (and may eventually find them in genetic engineering). And we
do not reject the theory of genetics because one of its possible uses is
unacceptable.
For those of you who seem to think that blind people can't be intelligent, have desires, or in short be anything like you, check out this article in today's Mercury News. T.V. Raman is a Cornell CS PhD, a serious emacs hacker, a major open-source advocate (check out the emacspeak web page for his complaints on "forced fenestration"!), and also happens to be blind...
A program I developed as part of my research just happens to be able to solve your problem trivially (except for nr of letters, but that is easy to add). Seriously, computer vision is the hardest field in AI now, any solution should use it.
Right off the top of my head have a few wav files like:
'type in the second letter of the word blind'
'now type in the third letter of the word 'January'
What's so friggin hard about that? And no spammer's gonna have the technology to bust that for a few years.
BTW, I haven't tested it yet, but I bet I could write some pattern recognition code that would crack 90% of those anti-spam bitmaps. Do you think spammers would pay me for that?
Gooood.
Just make text versions of the ads -- Google proves that they work better anyway.
Hmmm, 100%? Well, you could set up a word problem (eewww... remember the SAT?), and have the user type in the answer at the end. I've seen systems using multiple choice, but that wouldn't block 100%.
For example, Bill is 50 miles away from Jane. If Jane starts driving at 10 miles an hour, how many hours will it take before Jane is 10 miles away from Bill?
You could specify that as an alternative to the graphic, and impose a 8 second penalty for the transfer. Yes, it's not fair to people who don't use graphics, but at least they can have a crack at passing the C/R system without having to get someone to help them.
And, for those who can't do math, you can always ask other questions:
If Bill and Bob are brothers, and Jane is Bob's daughter, what is Bill's relationship to Jane?
A duck is what kind of animal?
Mickey Mouse's girlfriend is named:
Not perfect (if you use typed respones vs. multiple choice, you run into issues where answers are correct, but not in an acceptable form, if you use multiple choice, you run the risk of random guessing making it past the c/r system.), but I'm sure someone can come up with a better method.
Your little story is predicated on the notion that because this was nuns and a charity, the city should have waived the safety code requirements and just let them use it as a shelter. That that would be better for the homeless. That being in the waived shelter is better then the street.
And if the shelter burned down, trapping everyone inside because it didn't have sprinklers/fire doors/exit lights, if it collapsed because it was structurally unsound, if it exposed everyone inside to asbestos/flaking lead paint/rat feces/mercury/etc, what then? Do you still think they'd be better off?
Giving someone the thumbs up to put people in a dangerous situation in the name of charity isn't common sense. It's a recipe for disaster. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
why do private businesses need to give a damn about certain minority groups of people? If I want to have a business... like SAY A MOVIE THEATER that does not cater to blind people, that's my problem, I lose out on potential revenue.
Blind people can't see the movie onscreen. They should sue. Who needs movie theaters, anyway.
I have been getting really heavy into the WAI and find that most of the problems that occur is when a decision has to be made between quality look/experience and accessibility (if a question is even raised).
Let's face it, the blind/deaf aren't a big market so many programmers(okay, the PHB makes the decision) go for the quality look/experience.
Another problem, is when people like me want to make a nice site, the WAI standards limit us in a lot of areas purely because the software the deaf/blind use is still inferior technology.
Why, then does this technology not get confronted by the mass of corporations looking for a buck or even the Open Source programmers that time and again kindly let society use their work. Simply put, market is small and not enough people care enough to dedicate a good portion of their time to make better screen readers for the deaf and blind.
So until this happens, the blind and deaf are just targeting the wrong people.
No problem.
:-/
I'll find Microsoft's phone number for you, and you can convince them
That site you're working on is an example of why the ADA is very important
Jason
ProfQuotes
Jesus, did you even read the post?
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
Graphics can be read by computer (OCR) and so can audio (seen the latest speech to text stuff?)
In SF there is some sort of center for blind people near Mission St by the freeway on-ramp. About 2O feet in the air, on the top of the building, there is a huge braille sign made with 12in dots.
Everytime I drive by that sign I laugh my a** off. Seriously, who was the idiot that came up with that idea? A blind person would have to rent a cherry picker in order to read that thing.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
This is an off-topic point but size comes before color when ordering adjectives.
You don't say [count] [color] [size] because it sounds funny.
Example: thirteen red big dogs
Instead you say [count] [size] [color]
Example: thirteen big red dogs
The order is as follows:
opinion adjectives: general/specific
descriptive adjectives: size/age/shape/colour/nationality/material
-- "The reward of suffering is experience." - Aeschylus
That's what people do here; whine. I've found that lots and lots of valium makes me not care as much anymore. My Kharma went from negative (or bad or something) to positive in just a couple of weeks.
While I agree whole heartedly that accessability should be a high priority for any business there needs to be a balance. Blind people are just not going to be able to do everything that seeing people can.
It seems to me that if a feature cannot be made accessable that doesn't mean you should just toss it out. there is no reason why someone's handicap should hold back the whole world. However, that doesn't seem to be the case here.
An audio work around seems entirely plausable, and easily as effective, as a garbled image. The other thing is here that a lot of these image challenge systems are there so that people can remain anonymous. So say if your yahoo and you want to let people be anonymous then your gonna get shady automated scripts. that's just the price of the feature. So IMNSHO there is no reaon why a company that has an image challange should lock out blind people. they should either drop the image challange or add an audio one.
Oh yeah, one more thing just for you: enough with javascript/flash trolling. just because you people dont like the way they CAN be used doesn't mean they are bad and you know it.
I call BS on this one. there's a time limit on ticket master. if you called in other friends to get their opinions you could have had to start the process over again. I've never had problems reading what they say.
Hmm, this brings up an interesting issue. Spam must really piss people off who use screen readers. Imagine having your screen reader trying to interpret "IfVSnh All To ols you need to ''b'uild your bi z we,bsite" or "Build your own casin0 and sportsb00k in just 10 minutes.". "Casin0" becomes "Cassin-Zero" and "sportsb00k" becomes "sportsba-zero-zero-kuh"
I was just reading Simson Garfinkel's column in MIT Technology Review's June 2003 edition where he points out that if computers can't figure it out, farm it off to people - they can.
:)
All these "obfuscated words/sounds" solutions are geared around a pair of concepts:
1. Spammers use computer automated systems to sign up for accounts.
2. These solutions are near impossible for computers to figure out.
It's all for nothing if the spammers set up sweat shop slave labor in countries where someone can be "hired" for US$0.50c per day. Just have them do it.
One of his best ones was the concept of having a "Free Porn" service where every (x) minutes you have to answer one of the obfuscated word thingos. Of course, it's one that's been generated by HotMail and then forwarded to the porn-viewer. Bang - don't even need a sweat shop - just rely on all the people who want free access to good porn on the 'net...
Garfinkel raises a really important issue here. All this crap just fails if you consider that there's a cheap human solution. He also notes that it's becoming *really* offensive to many to have to prove that they're a human...
Food for thought gang - all too often are technological barriers easily thwarted by cheap human solutions (if you've ever worked somewhere where labour is dirt cheap, the last thing you consider/promote is "reducing your head count" when selling computer systems
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
Use whois to look up a domain. You see any email addresses listed?
hinderfreude ('hin-dur-"froi-d&), n. The feeling of joy derived from being in the way.
are there any pure text captchas? there are plenty of people with visual and audio imparements.
this seems like an arms race that's bound to fail... i don't see the point in pursuing it.
Need a Catering Connection
I can imagine such techniques to limit the availability of data. Today it is the 1% of the population who cannot use the image form. Tommorow it may be the few percents of users that do run IE. Next year it may the several percent of us who choose not to run MS validated hardware.
By demanding universal availability, we help insure that we will have access in the future.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Q. How many Disabled People's Rights Activist does it take to change a light bulb?
A. It's not the light bulb that needs changing - it's the rest of society's attitude that needs changing!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I think not. The whole economy of spam is based on extremely low yeild, but even more extreemly cheap messaging. Even one cent per spam would drastically change the whole issue.
And how, I ask, would a blind person identify the bubble with the picture of the fish next to it?
As for common knowledge questions, I'm all for them. That way we can prevent those who don't even know who the president of the US is from doing themselves harm online.
Regards,
--
*Art
I dunno... I had to make several attempts the other day when purchasing tickets from them. The images were obscured to the point of illegibility.
not plane, nor bird, nor even frog...
The level of ignorance in some of these comments is really appalling to me. People here are saying that maybe the blind and disabled shouldn't be using the web. I think that's an extremely ignorant and narrow way of thinking. You are missing the larger picture. Clear and useful alternatives need to be created for the disabled so that they can live their lives and better themselves like each one of us has been given the opportunity to. They can't drive, right, but there is mass transit and other transportation services available. Where's the alternative to the web? As more and more parts of our lives are put online, there are fewer and fewer alternatives to using the web. This isn't about the blind and disabled simply being able to "enjoy" the web by looking at entertainment sites. This is about the blind and disabled being able to function as a normal human being, work, and live their lives like you & I do. More and more parts of our daily jobs are being replaced and "bettered" with computer software, web applications, and other electronic devices. I'm not talking about programming jobs, either, this is something that is happening in all fields of work. Obviously, concessions will need to be made and there will be jobs that not everyone will be able to complete. However, I'm not willing to leave the blind and disabled behind because they "don't need the web."
because if you are not a troll, then how come you posted as an AC. [now this post is a real flaimbait post; which can be easily misunderstood as a troll] besides that, evolution is not just about the physical senses. if it is just that, then we are surely on the lower echelon of the evolutionary scale. there are many animals out there that have superior strength, eyes, nose, ears, etc. then ours. so, fuck off. evolution is also about increasing our collective sociological feelings, which include taking care of the weak. not only are you a troll, you are also a retard. because watching a week's worth of animal planet or national geographic would help you understand that only the more evolved species take care of their own. that is the trait of an evolved species. and not brute strength. examples posted by a previous poster (i.e, hawking, bethoven, etc.) are great counter-examples to your (-1; Troll; Flawed Logic; Idiot) post.
now supporting:
cmdrTaco for president '04
michael for oval office intern summer '05
That's two really, really big ifs.
I prefer to take them at their merits, as fellow human beings.
What about homosexuals?
If homosexuality was proved to have a genetic cause, would you take the same attitude?
I think not, and I'm happier to treat my fellow man as an equal based on agnosticism than the rantings of some Judean cavemen.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Yep. On every one of my domains (except .org, a work in progress).
The point is to make spamming more expensive. if you can't make them pay postage, make them pay a compute penalty, fund research into computerized vision system or pay baleful hungry Chinese to do the OCR for them. Whatever the means, make them pay. Using CR, systems, you've thrown a wrench in the works of all the spammers using turnkey spamming systems who have no clue what to do when their system stops working. With CR you've also raised the cost of doing business, and if the cost can be made high enough spamming might become uneconomical. That's the ultimate goal.
Um, yeah...
What's your point?
...couldn't you simply direct the user to perform a few simple tasks? (e.g. select the bubble with the picture of the fish next to it, then type the last name of the president of the united states in the second box from the left) I doubt AI would be able to cope with as system like this, especially if you had varying combinations of tests. If you had a variety of these tests, you could also make some that accomodated the disabled, too.
Think about the problem some more, and I'm sure you'll see why what you just proposed is harder than it sounds. First, as beavis88 said, not everyone knows trivia. You'd either have to go through a lot of work and money(!) to make a lot of questions, or make so few that a program could memorize them and answer them with an automated script. Same with "selecting the fish" - spend lots of money, or risk a brute-force hack. You could keep modifying the tests and introducing new ones, but that takes human effort and, again, money.
Mangled text is great - it's easy to make a program that can make random text strings and apply random manglings to it, but there's no cheap, reliable program that recovers the original text from the result. Meanwhile, it's assumed that anyone using the Internet can read, and can parse mangled text. (Except not, as is seen here.)
Lately democracy seems to be based on the skybox, the Happy Meal box, the X-box, and the idiot box.
Wouldn't it be easy to have the audio file speak like a human? If you record, for example:
The first letter is A, the number following A is 56, then there's a lowercase T, and then a 17
Spammers could try to use voice recognition, but would get all the extra words to sort out, and have to find a way to distinguish between when "a" is part of speech or is a letter to be used.
Another thing- the Olympics totally disregards representing both the physically disabled and the obese. I mean, just because someone weights 450lbs doesnt mean they should at least be given the opportunity to run the 100m dash. Where does it end?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Electronic communications are a resource by far too vital
-as a case in point: especially for people with disabilities-
to allow it to be destroyed by the scourge of spam.
Tell your politicians (yes, you! now!) to make a bold move and eradicate what has plagued the medium for much too long already:
Make their mantra "Ban spam, because you can."
Although or blind and deaf, you're still out of luck.
Which brings up a point... what're the only other senses left? Well, touch, taste, and smell. Taste and smell are probably not well suited to the interpretation of data... but we already know that touch can be. Braille and raised lettering on important signs is generally considered one mark of an accessible building. There's braille terminals even, as anyone who'se seen the movie Sneakers knows.
So... why isn't there a tactile "braille" image renderer available? You've seen those toys with thousands of little small rods that you impress an object into, and the rods are displaced by it and on the other side you see (or feel!) an "image" of the object. Hook something like this up to an electromechanical device for lowering and raising the rods based on the intensity of a grayscaled image, and you've got a tactile image display. Accessibility problem solved. Even for blind/deaf folks.
Now, once the smell-o-vision is invented, we can take it futher...
Tweet, tweet.
The thing is, you don't have to concede anything!
There's solutions that add benefits for minorities *without* subtracting from the majority. Sometimes it even benefits everyone.
How would it be worse for a non-blind to answer a short written sentence than identifying numbers on images? Please explain.
As for examples on how it can benefit everyone to think of minorities, consider these few:
- Doors that open at the press of a button.
- Gas pumps that you can use without cranking your neck.
- Ramps on sidewalks and buildings make it possible for moms to use their strollers too (and Kaiman to use his Segway).
- The remote control you use on your TV was originally designed as an aid for handicapped people!
It's not an either/or, black/white situation. You can do a LOT with a little bit of thinking. It's that thinking part that seems to have taken a hit.
Regards,
--
*Art
Find an IQ test and pick some of the easier questions. They would be really hard to code an automated responder to and should be answerable to anyone with enough intellegence to use the site to begin with.
Graphics can be read by computer (OCR) and so can audio
What about a question?
Text-to-speech of "what is four plus three", or "how many legs does a cat have", or "what color is the sky", or "what is the first letter of the word 'dog'" (or any other simple question) would stump pretty much any speech-to-text system...
the deaf community should tag along...
what's with your phone number being a required form field? i've yet to find that filling in "i am deaf" passes the javascript/server numbers-only validation.
- p
u need 2 lrn 2 thnk rationally b4 u go spouting shit on the intrnt.
It's a long while (I think since uni) since I read such an ill formed pile of shit.
The network has no influence at all on the Turing test - all that matters is the messages passed between the two participants.
Whatever you're blathering on about has nothing whatsoever to do with Turing, and probably more to do wit htrying to get a quick hand job off your Soliology 101 supervisor.
Pillock.
If the book has better examples, stunners, find the book and post them. I'll check back later. For now, I'll stay deeply suspicious of anyone trumpeting "common sense".
I bet the designers of such programs never saw this coming.
Never meddle in the affairs of dragons,
for you are crunchy and good with catsup.
Now that would be great to have a word really jumbled in an image, then providing the same word in cleartext in the ALT attribute so the visually challenged can get it read for them!
Uh yeah. I see lots of em. Just about everytime I use whois from the CL. I hope the nerds in charge of abuse reports like spam. Cause that's what they're getting!
Anti-social? My code is just platform-specific.
it could be modified to look for keywords.. by just reconizing "legs" and "cat", it could know how to answer that question
One of Slashdot's own trolls posted a script-fu for the GIMP to scrub Slashdot's humanconf images (used in their new account signup process) into images ready to feed into GOCR. He even says he has wrapped it up in a perl script to automate the process.
For the curious, you can google for his GIMP script but I'm not going to post a direct link.
And if an ordinary troll can do it for the simple thrill of trolling, imagine what a dedicated spammer whose income depends on stuff like this would do. I think it's a real issue.
My solution to the Yahoos and Hotmails and whoever else is using a CAPTCHA would be to use an automated voice response telephone system instead. Systems like that can easily issue the codes required to continue with the signup process, but have the spam deterrent of identification via ANI built in. (Automatic Number Identification is somewhat similar to Caller ID but is used for billing purposes.) Granted, I am assuming that most people who have Internet access also have telephone access of some sort. But if you were a spammer, you probably wouldn't be willing to give up your phone number for more than a handful of signups, therefore making a system like this not worth scripting.
John
seriously. so the blind cant fill out forms. even if i was blind i would be like "man that sucks" and go on with my life. blind people cant drive a car either. does that mean car manufacturers have to figure out a way they can drive or get sued? if youre blind there are certain things you cant do. deal with it. why do people have to sue over everything? this is one thing i hate about america.
Whatever happened to help. I'm going blind, and I would just ask a friend or spouse to help with this one 4 second operation on the computer. In addition I would feel no discrimination for doing so. There are lots of normal things that are just easier to do with a small amount of help.
Regardless of how the bums acquired said quarters, the quarters become their property upon acquisition. If someone gives me $1,000, and I blow it all on miscellanea, I've still spent that $1,000. And, whatever I spent it on cost me $1,000 and was not free. The bums spent their quarters to get a room for the night. Had they just broken into the bathrooms and stayed for the night, you might make the case that they were acquired for free.
speakers are not a fundamental part of the machine like a monitor is. Most computers in the office I am now sitting in do not have speakers.
Now you're discriminating against the stupid. You can't do that - too many government employees, particularly the elected variety, would be kept out.
Deaf people have phone numbers. Both my parents know how to use a tty. My mom even has a Cell phone.
This doesn't discriminate against the blind. It descriminates against the blind who have no sighted family or co-workers. That seems like an insanely small percentage. In fact the only place that might happen is in pro-blind lobbying groups. Hence, this situation.
"How many legs does a cat with three legs have?"
Come on, there are loads of ways this could be done.
Wouldn't that be discriminating against the stupid?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
How do we accomodate them?
The paperless office never seems to consider the Amish...
The audio thing is no good either,
some people such as myself are hearing damaged and can barely understand people as it is.
I have to have people speak directly to me so I can see their mouth moving else I have extreme trouble understanding what they are saying because my hearing is so badly damaged.
I can understand the verification method being a "good" method to stop bots from doing evil deeds but they really have created a serious hurdle for the blind. What to do eh???
Damned if you do, damned if you don't....
But that would discriminate against the stupid!
There are no tiger attacks in my area and it's all because this rock I'm holding keeps the tigers away.
Perhaps I am missing something, but are nt web sites a uniquely visual medium. I mean, television is visual but they have sound for those blind who just need that. I guess one can tell I am not blind but what sites are there that cater to people with that particular handicap?
Remember that having a text-only web browser is something that you can change. You could easily goto someone else's computer that has a GUI and a graphical web browser to sign up for that account. However, if you are severely visiually impaired, that's something that you can't change. Therefore, the analogy you presented can't be applied.
The first rule in making a site "accessible" to the blind, to cell phone-based browsers, to Lynx, and to those with very very slow Internet connections is to put all text in the HTML of a web page. Among other things, this allows the page to be most easily read by automated agents.
Most of the time that is a goal of the web designer.
In specific cases, a web designer wants to make sure a site cannot be used by an automated agent -- specifically if the site can be easily abused. One example is putting email addresses in images so that they cannot be harvested by spammers. Another is forcing users to read text and type it back so that a web-based email account site cannot be abused and so that content cannot be easily harvested.
Trading off the accessibility to prevent abuse is perfectly understandable, and really not surprising.
1. Audio would discriminate against the deaf, so more million$ for greedy bastard lawyers and assholeriffic blind people who hire them.
2. Actually, the graphics are specifically designed to be difficult to read by OCR. Typically they are black and white with many stray marks to mislead the OCR, or are a "negative", where the letters are formed not by marks, but by a lack of marks in a certain area, or by any number of other clever methods.
3. Audio would be much tougher to add "noise" to to make recognition troublesome, although speaker-independent, continuous speech recognition of the entire dictionary has a long way to go still. (But you can do it quite well if you restrict the word set to a few dozen or so.) So maybe audio of rare words might not be so tough.
4. Audio also has the problem that people would have to spell the word on their own, which they would mess up easily. For the visual picture, they only have to copy it.
5. Two methods to cover both blind and deaf would allow two posibilities for page scrapers to automate registrations, halving the liklihood of preventing such an attack. Each additional method would decrease the security further.
"Has [being a kidnapped teenage girl, raped repeatedly for months] changed you?" - Katie Couric to Elizabeth Smart
Blind people should be put down like injured animals. They cost you & me a god damn fortune with their audible cross walks, brail on keys. Everything required for a blind person to function gets passed on to the consumer or the tax payer.
Put them out of their fucking misery!
SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST! GG K THX!
Sorry. I'm not trying to troll here, although I know I'll be accused of being horribly insensitive. Accomodation can only go so far. It can only be reasonable. If you are blind, I am truly sorry--I really am--but you are going to face some inconveniences in your life. Having to read the picture of the little word to sign up for something online is one of those inconveniences. Ask someone who can see to read the damn word for you. It's not hard, it's really easy, and there's nothing to feel bad about. If there is a tradeoff between autonomy and pride, it is only imaginary. What if the blind person is all alone and there's nobody there to read the word? Pick up the phone and call the next door neighbor or a friend. If ya don't have a neighbor or any friends, you have bigger problems than not being able to sign up for a hotmail account.
As a side note, if they are going to sue someone, sue the spammers who make this picture-word system necessary.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
That's one way to keep your Pinto from exploading.
(Spoken by someone once rear-ended in a 1971 Pinto.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I wonder how newspapers get away with being so obviously biased against the blind...
And radio stations are completely leaving out the deaf audience.
Nike doesn't make shoes that fit people who have no legs.
The list goes on.
.sigs are for post^Hers.
Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test.
Know what a complete sentence is?
Has at least a noun and a verb.
Takes a village.
Beats me.
Couldn't ask for a nicer day.
Appreciate it.
Can't say.
Asses are for crapping, not screwing.
It's been a long time since I read the book, and I'm not actually sure that I read it, but I recall an example from a book that is, at the very least, very similar. If this is not strictly accurate, it's because it's been three years; but for what it's worth.
One company had a large quantity of limestone, stored outside. I don't know why they had the limestone, I'm guessing they sold it to people who needed a quantity of rock. It rained, altering the Ph levels or something along those lines. Some federal regulation kicked in, requiring a hazardous materials license to move it around; so business was frozen until it dried up again.
Again, this may not be the complete story or from the wrong book.
Sigs are like bumper stickers.
No text
even the letters/numbers being sung in a song would be as efficient a deterrant as the method they're employing today.
the ocr obfustication used in most of these tests would be troublesome but quite possible for someone to break. The idea behind what they are using is that you can't just throw the image through a filter and then shove the output through over the counter ocr software to get the data. This form of protection provides them a reasonable buffer to keep every script kiddie out there from abusing their services.
They could do something as loosely protected from speach recognition.
If people are determined to crack the protection method they will. You created the protection using technology, it's going to be bypassed by technology eventually. It's all really just a matter of deterance.
How much you wanna bet the AT&T speach engine can sing bf389256 to the tune of innagoddadavida or other catchy tunes, maybe overlay that with ocean waves or random city noise in the background. Come to think of it that would be a really fun project and make great PR for ATT!
sure someone could figure out how to get past it, but the work to do so would be a bit prohibitative.
Asses are for crapping, not screwing.
You could easily goto someone else's computer that has a GUI and a graphical web browser to sign up for that account.
And someone who is vision-impaired could go and get help from someone who has a graphical browser.
The point is that the Web is not exclusively graphical, and should not be treated as such by designers. The basic foundation of the Web is HTTP, which is the last time I checked, a TEXT protocol. To convey information exclusively via non-text means is to deliberately force users to use graphics (or javascript, or flash, etc.) That some users have a choice to switch, and some don't is incidental - the main issue is that this choice really shouldn't be forced upon users at all.
Clients render content however they wish. Users can mess with font sizes, override background colors, turn off images, turn off java/javascript, refuse to load flash, resize their windows, have different fonts installed, etc. Different operating systems and different browsers have different ways of treating tabs, different ways of handling things like form elements, etc. Designers need to accept this fact and move on. After all, being able to make a site look good, and work well in spite of all these potential pitfalls is why good designers are in demand, right?
What's up with that, sayin all disabled people are like saints and you get your soul back if you hang out with them? Crap almighty, I mean, most disabled folks I've met are really self-centered and play it for all its worth. I swear to god they get together and have a good laugh at how us able bodied folks bend over backwards for them. Sheesh Louise!
Asses are for crapping, not screwing.
The stupid are not a protected group such as the physically disabled, racial minorities, women, people of various "unpopular" religions...
..isn't it a lot easier to recognize a number printed on an image than from a sound file? :|
If a train station is a place where a train stops, what's a workstation?
For a good many visually impaired people, the whole point is that they can survive on their own as well as their visually active counterparts.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
Poorly argued refutation to top it all. Parent refers to other cripples, which could easily include all my off-the-cuff examples, and doesn't restrict itself to arguing against special treatment, which might make self-support relevant, but actively argues for "thinning the herd" by refusing food. About now is when I invoke Godwin's law, compare this attitude to Nazi eugenics programs and end the discussion.
Anybody who cannot see a garbled word graphic also cannot see a banner ad. For one of the sites I'm working on, that's enough to make them persona non grata on that site...
That's kind of silly. Consider a vision-impaired user with a screen reader to render text (blind doesn't necessarily mean completely inable to see - they might use one of those screen utilities to blow a 64x64 chunk of the screen to fill a 20" monitor). Normal users might glance at a banner ad, and mostly ignore it. A person relying on a reader would have to sit through a text version of the ad being read. Which version of the ad is going to make a bigger impact? The one that's being ignored, or the one that is being read and listened to?
I think it was Bill Maher that said "why does everybody have to do everything?" I mean seriously. Sure, sucks to be blind, but for the love of god, rather than whining about discrimination, COME UP WITH A BETTER IDEA to prevent bots registering.
We'll ignore the obvious stupidity when it comes to filling forms in to start with. Surely blind people know SOMEONE who can see. It's not that hard to grab someone and say "can you type in what that says".
I'm colourblind. The fire service where I used to live discriminated against me where I live by not hiring me due to my defective colour receptors, someone call a lawyer.
I have a very rare form of colourblindness. My wife has to help with a lot of stuff involving colours (note that magic word, HELP), I failed to get into the air force due to this and my hearing... "Oh, someone call Lionel Hutz, I've been discriminated against..."
I feel for the blind, I really do. I've had some blind acquaintances, but this is just ridiculous.
Maybe I should sue someone because, by not being blind, I can't be a piano virtuoso like Stevie Wonder...
My internet is primarily electro-magnetic: mostly aligned magnetic bits- billions per square inch- on oxide or thin film discs (someday to be replaced with nanocrystal superlattice films) and electrons. And more recently it is CDMA2000 formatted radio waves. As I don't currently have either an ethernet adaptor or cellular receiving station in my brain I have to have my internet translated into a visual format so I can read it. But I could have it translated into sound if necessary- it just wouldn't be as fast for me.
Your "primarily visual" internet- it is composed of icons and mediaglyphics? Which only computers with optical sensors can process? It only covers topics like card tricks, miming, and optical illusions? Or do you mean "primarily visual" items like blinking text, Flash, and ads that bounce around the screen? I find that these inherently visual items get in the way of actual information, and I'd rather do without them.
Actually it just happened to be the pull quote available on Amazon's page on the book.
-- David
David Whatley
What is ticketmaster's issue?
I mean, you're providing a credit card number and address? That should make you real-enough.
Unless someone is going to use a script and a stack of stolen cards to buy-out an event.
Maybe we shouldn't worry so much about the monitors and the web forms as keyboards better suited to paws. Probably the problem is that the dogs just can't type them correctly.
Ok, BAD! I'm still using Network Solutions. Flame me later.
I have several domains for my use and the use of my own business. All of them are at Network Solutions.
I also am a consultant who needs to be able to create new domains for businesses, usually because of a merger. I have the business people brainstorm a few keywords, and then run a quick program to identify which are available. My program does not work with the new requirement for OCR.
I am certain that most spammers will have little difficulty bypassing this restriction. And I am certain that I could do it if it was important. But I taught the last customer how to do it and said call me when they have a new domain; it is not worth my time to write a program to do it when I'll only use it every 6 months, and I can easily transfer the responsibility.
I wrote to Network Soultions asking that as a customer I be given some method to check domains. It could be limited to 100 per day, and 400 per month. They make a sale if I find one that satisfies my customers. They replied with instructions for using the current system, including a line about typing in the letters in the picture. [sarcasm]It was a great help.[/sarcasm]
I have 4 domains that will need renewal this year. The last time I tried to renew with Network Solutions, it took 3 tries on the web and 4 phone calls giving my credit card each time, and 2 months later someone else owned the domain. The domain had not been advertised, so it was not a particular hardship for me, but I cannot lose any other domains. Any advice on transferring to another registrar? Especially one that makes it easy for customers to check for available domains.
I spend my life entertaining my brain.
Isn't this what the ALT attribute is for? :-)
I guess I am confused as to why anyone (Blind, Lynx user, Joe Coke in the CD tray) has a "right" to a "free" account. There are times when the "advocates" do far more harm with their lawsuites than good. They will sue, some judge will grant them the injunction, and all that will happen will be pissed off companies. They will certainly loose some of my goodwill. I duno.
You are also assuming that every website that can afford to display a graphic-encoded number can also afford to have a dedicated phone line with an automated voice response system. And that is a wrong assumption.
I can't believe the number of posts basically saying "well, it's their problem they're blind, let them sort it out". People are people and you should accommodate them as much as possible. For example, elderly people are increasingly using the web. May of them are partially sighted - should they be prevented from using email to contact their family?
In the UK (at least, I guess more so on the continent), there is extensive legislation about disabled access to public buildings. You have to provide reasonable access to wheelchairs etc. All new lifts have braille buttons, spoken announcements etc for the blind. Why shouldn't this apply to some extent to web sites too?
Graphics are an easy solution, but it is unfair to the blind.
Sound files are a little more trouble to generate, but they are unfair to the deaf
Ideally, the means used to screen out everything except actual people should be:
- Quick and easy for the server to generate and validate
- Representable as plain text, so the blind and deaf are not disadvantaged
- Solvable by anyone over some arbitrary level of intelligence
The thought occurred to me of using puzzles - simple math problems, logic puzzles, and inferring facts from a short passage.I've been writing scripts to generate simple math problems (an example is here), logic puzzles (a bunch of facts about people, with a question along the lines of "Who ate pie" that can be solved via inference from the given facts), and other simple tasks of mental skill.
My goal is to build a module that will generate and check a simple puzzle (randomly selected from several different types of puzzles) that should take a normal person 15-30 seconds of thought.
It would also be useful to have scalable levels of difficulty - some discussion forums might want harder problems as part of account creation, to make the creation of new accounts a more burdensome task so that people would be (hopefully) more likely to restrict themselves to a single identity.
IMHO...
Laws are represented as universally applicable.
Morals are somthing that each person must develop for its* self.
*my choice for 'gender neutrality'
Has'nt anyone heard of the mixed non-correlated sound separation problem? I would have imagined that at least SOME /. readers besides myself would be aware of this AI proble. geesh
Right now it is just a few sites but I have seen the number of sites using this method triple in the last few months. All it takes is one company to step up and come up with a way around it. As someone in another post said Microsoft has started to do this by detecting Braille on the persons machine. I think this is also a great opportunity for the open-source community to step up.
I think a blind person would thoroughly enjoy Strong Bad's email, but is there anything a blind person could use to navigate a website such as homestarrunner?
If the corporation in reference is Ticket Master (which I'm sure it is), I for one hope they get sued. An $11 service fee(referred to as a "convenience fee") on a $33 ticket is beyond outrageous. Can someone say monopoly?
Either way, that guy is a dumbass.
Actually, a website (which includes a webform) which isn't accessable to the blind is a breach of the Antidiscrimination Act is Australia. It's a Federal Offence, and the fines can be up to about $2.5 million.
There have been sucessful prosecutions over websites with only graphical menus that didnt have ALT attributes so that text-to-speech converters didnt work.
Up Next: Associations for the deaf start suing record companies for discrimination because they don't print song lyrics on CDs.
You'd think those blind people would get it through their heads that there are some things they just don't need to do on their own. It's like the blacks in the 60s... they should have just been content with the way things were, and not gone whining to the government to get that overbearing Civil Rights Act passed. One of the guiding philosophies of the Nat'l Federation of the Blind (nfb.org) is that blindness itself is merely a nuisance; it's the attitudes of sighted people that make it difficult to be blind. I'm sorry to say that most of the posts on this thread strongly reinforce that position.
Whenever anyone starts saying that people are better off on the street than living in sub-code building, I know that they have lived a sheltered life.
I grew up in what would now be considered a squatter's shack, no running water, eventually self-generated power. My family rebuilt the place from a shell that hadn't been lived in ~60 years, judging from the old newspaper we found scattered around. I have no idea what the code for that area was, but we weren't building to it. We had lots of (horribly unsanitary) animals running around, grew much of our own produce, and had an outhouse.
It was a fine place to grow up.
Are you saying that we should have been homeless instead, because our substandard shelter was unsafe unsafe?
Now add in the fact that building codes are as much a special interest game as any other legislation.
Some folks might believe I'm making this up. I assure you, I'm not, and won't bother to respond if that's your contention.
I forget what 8 was for.
In his interview, Joe Clark discussed this--if my memory serves correctly.
Somewhere in his [lengthy] responses he suggested that considering accessibility in user interface design will result in a solution that's better for all. (I at least bought his arguments. ;-)
Is there some blazingly fast, free, accurate OCR software floating around that people have been using to cheat wet forms?
Why does it need to be blazingly fast or free? There's decent, not-too-expensive OCR software out there, and how long would it take to write an OCR program for the specific task, given that you know the size and position and probably number of characters, all of which come from a limited set?
There must be a way to get around this, perhaps having an actual live person tend some phone calls? Companies spend so much money on these elaborate phone menu labyrinths designed to answer any and all questions possible, but for a case like this, a few actual people that could respond to a "visually impaired subscriber hot-line" would take care of this problem without incurring all that much more cost.
On Wall Street they say "buy low, sell high" On the pad we say, "buy high, sell high" Isn't that somehow better?
webforms and graphics implies not spammers
webforms and graphics implies not blind people
then blind people implies spammers.
Simple. WE should be suing THEM.
How do blind people find braille in order to "read" it? I'm not making a joke, I've seriously often wondered this.
The word you want is "scalper".
They don't want you buying 120 tickets and selling them for face price^2.
Never confuse volume with power.
Stephen Hawking - diagnosed with ALS *after* obtaining his Ph.D., and doctors still don't have any solid evidence linking ALS to genetic causes. Even after ALS took effect, Hawking *supported himself*, which is the key principle here - he didn't sue anyone or demand handouts from anyone else. Try again.
Actually there is at least one form of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, motor neuron disease or in the US "Lou Gehrig's disease") that is genetically based. A point mutation on chromosome 21 causes the body to produce an incorrect version of the chemical superoxide dismutase. This mutated version of SOD1 does not protect against oxidative damage to motor neurons to the same extent that the normal version of SOD1. This is why there is a classification of ALS called FALS, for "familial amyotrophic lateral sclerosis".
cheap labor conservatives - they want to keep you hungry enough to be thankful for minimum wage.
In the piles of forged bounces I've recieved recently, there are a few anti-spam-challenge emails. Curious, I follow the link.
Yes, I have found the AnswerWord right there in the ALT tag. Now, that's real secure.
Many of the solutions involved creative forms of l33t, many asked common-sense type questions, and the best ones were based on comprehension tests as described in earlier comments.
There was one cool one I remember which presented a list of sentences, most of which were nonsense with psuedo-grammatical constructions, and the rest of which were convoluted but made sense. The reader was asked to pick which ones made sense. It 's not perfect but it's a cool idea.
It's a really interesting problem.
"Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test."
I wonder if a corollary of the Turing test is that 'only an intelligent being can administer a turing test'? (How can non-intelligence test for intelligence?) Consequently and those distorted letters could not be any form of Turing test.
Maybe that will be humankind's job when all other jobs are automated! To administer Turing tests! :-)
Moderation: Flamebait
> then type the last name of the president of the united states
Does the average American know the last name of the president of the united states? ;-)
I'd like to see that happen with the English language.
announcement: "type in the word 'there' to continue".
user: is it supposed to be "there", "their", or "they're"?
Or how about, "type in tomato(e)"?
$cat
I have a book called, Algorithms for Image Processing and Computer Vision. J.R. Parker. Wiley Coputer Publishing. All that stuff is in there including code samples. I actually have a couple of patent apps in (and screw the people who don't like that) for some pattern recognition-type stuff so I have a fair idea of how I would go about it. You're definitely on the right track.
It seems like you could get prevent even the most advanced speech recognition algorithms available these days from recognizing the "key phrase" that should be entered into a form by using a text such as Ladle Rat Rotten Hut. These kinds of texts are nonsensical if interpreted literally, but if you use the context and the phonetic sounds of the words (as humans automatically do) to interpret the text, the meaning is crystal clear.
'get prevent' should be 'prevent'. Sorry.
I'm sorry, but that's all your viewpoint comes down to.
First, there are a whole hell of a lot more than "a couple" blind/vision-impared people (no, it's not 8%, but it's not a handful either). Regardless of the number though, it's extremely significant to those people. The fact that you don't give a damn how difficult their life is, just because it won't make a significant difference to your bottom line, is unfeeling and reprehensible.
As for your claim that they can't really use the internet, all I can say is: No shit, Sherlock. They can't really use a lot of it because thousands of people like you don't care enough to make it usable. Your attempt to rationalize away your bigotry is only that: a rationalization. It doesn't make you right, and it doesn't make your views any less disturbing.
BECAUSE computers can just take the WAV and covert it to text pretty well nowadays. If you've seen the images they are complaining about they are all lines out to prevent OCR at that.
Well the lawyers are at it all websites should sue any blind/lynx visitors under the DMCA for circumventing ads and preventing the website from generatieng any revenue.
(weeee my first bad joke!)
Audio would discriminate against the deaf
Would it? Even as an alternative to a visual method?
the graphics are specifically designed to be difficult to read by OCR
I never said it wasn't. I'm quite familiar with the technique. What relevance does this have to my suggestion?
Audio would be much tougher to add "noise" to to make recognition troublesome
Re-read my post. You don't need to add "noise" - the fact that you're asking simple questions covers that.
Audio also has the problem that people would have to spell the word on their own, which they would mess up easily
If someone is gonna mess up a word such as "blue", "dog" or "cat", then they're at a reading level that it won't matter anyway.
Two methods to cover both blind and deaf would allow two posibilities for page scrapers to automate registrations, halving the liklihood of preventing such an attack.
In theory. In reality, since this type of attack is so difficult with current technology, it's irrelevant - in essence you're saying "well, sure you should use a 65536-bit key for your encryption, but because you're only using a 32768-bit key you're halving the difficulty of cracking your message."
how does the blind person identify "the bubble" and "next to it"?
Instead of "bubble" use "radio button", which is the standard name in HTML.
"Next to it" has a straightforward meaning in the XHTML document tree.
Will I retire or break 10K?
close.
but they'll simply download a 20 kilobyte program that binds to the serial/usb port and EMULATES a braille translator.
My main rant is this: private industry can discriminate. I don't care who they are, any private company can (or should be able to) intentionally single out individual groups and refuse service to them if they want to. They shouldn't, but they certainly have that right. Why not?
Antitrust law defines a monopolist and states that monopolists have to follow different rules in order to preserve competition elsewhere. The Americans with Disabilities Act may have placed accessibility requirements on monopolists.
Will I retire or break 10K?
everybody knows you go to the pet store to buy giraffes
There is (was?) a pet store in the mall here in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Still, I'd be more likely to go with the "toy store"/"stuffed animal" interpretation. Toys "R" Us has a giraffe for a mascot, you know.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I agree that ignorance is a factor but in many cases a forgivable factor. Even I acknowledge my ignorance as to how a web site such as Worth 1000 or Newgrounds would cater to users with vision deficiencies.
Will I retire or break 10K?
hmmm ... where DID i put that Spam?
People are vegetarian by choice, not handicap.
Some people are vegetarian by allergy.
Will I retire or break 10K?
So many people have expressed insane frustration about this whole issue... but I imagine that insane frustration is exactly what many blind people experience every day as they try and make their way through a world that is built for sighted people.
If you're ranting because the U.S. courts are out of control, then put the blame where it's due.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
... music, for instance.
Play a well-known snippet of music, with possibly slight random distortion to prevent programs from doing bitwise recognition, and have the user type in the artist or the song name (the software should accept either). They should get three tries to get one correct, in case the user doesn't know, say, the Beatles, or Vivaldi, or Mozart.
This could be simplified and expanded by simply hvaing users match a work of art to the artist. Hamlet=Shakespeare, Star Wars=Geore Lucas, and so forth.
While designing a test that is simple enough for a computer to give but difficult enough that a computer cannot trivially answer it, drawing on the shared cultural knowledge of humans might be a solution.
Even I know that! It's Dubya :P
Nike doesn't make shoes that fit people who have no legs.
That is, "Nike doesn't make gloves." What do you mean by that?
Will I retire or break 10K?
The problem is not preventing a program from being able to automatically sign up for any form it chooses, it is preventing a specialized program for preforming mass automatic sign-ups on one particular service. Those types of programs can cope with a bit more, since their developers code them to deal with what is already being used. Programs are much more effective at recognizing what they are being given, if they know are already expecting it. Let's say, for instance, that a company has several sound files of recorded voices, one of which it requires you to transpose in orger to sign up for their service. A random voice-recognition program may have trouble recognizing the word, but a program that has the sound files in its library already would have no trouble at all. Even if the company recorded hundreds of sound files with different voice actors, a program trained to those voices and files still would be able to figure out the word a good enough percentage of the time to render the precaution defunct.
So sites try to use computers to deliver information set up such that computers can't recognise it? Somehow that idea seems inherently flawed...
I mean, my friends and family, who can see, have me do little crap like this for them because it blows their mind. "something is wrong with this website. these words come up and there are all these lines through it. I figured I would just wait for you to come by".
are newspapers discriminating agenst the blind if they dont have a brale version? get over it and accept your limitations.
a) You didn't actually read the book you were promoting or
b) You did read the book which was so unmemorable that you had to go to Amazon.com and grab the pull quote.
I'm not going to attempt to respond to this. This is worse then anecdotal. You might have read the book, this story might be from the book, you've no idea why anyone involved in the possible story is doing anything they're doing and you've no idea whether you've left anything out of importance.
That's a pretty sketchy example, but I'll take a stab at it: I'm quite glad the hazardous material was treated as hazardous. I'm not sure exactly what happened; limestone by itself doesn't AFAIK become strongly alkaline (or acidic for that matter) in water. Regardless, assuming the material truly was harmful the fact that the source was as common as limestone or that its status changed with its wetness doesn't change the fact that you don't want people not prepared to handle the stuff doing so. Many strong acids & bases can get on your skin and not cause noticeable burns until hours later, someone who says, "oh, it's just limestone" could find themselves seriously in trouble.
You say your squatter shack was a fine place to grow up? Would you be willing to force homeless people to live in it (In NYC during winter months, the police are empowered to remove homeless people from the streets and forcibly place them in shelters)? Would you go back to live in it yourself? Would you let your kids live in it? How would you feel if you forced someone to live there and they died because of substandard safety?
Funny - never trust the client. That's rule number one when developing web applications.
I don't know what proprietary extension to HTTP MS wants to employ to transmit this information (maybe some fscked up User-Agent header), but I pretty sure it can be circumvented in less than 10 LOC.
Ahhh the good old identity tests...anyone remember leisure suit larry? Sierra had questions you had to answer to prove you were of the appropriate age to play the game...it was a riot...and a joke...the only way you could really ever verify authenticity would be to use id systems for everything...resulting in a complete loss of anonymity...and thats assuming (laughably) that someone couldnt hack/spoof digital ids...which means a horrible loss of privacy for a questionable increase in security/verification
Maybe a computer can decipher letters by speech recognition, but it cannot reason like people.
Why not an audio test such as:
"What do you get if you add three to twenty five?"
or something similar. It just needs to involve some thought but can still be very trivial for a human.
The spammers will only bother to automate sign ups for big webmail sites. Smaller ones probably deal with a few to a few dozen signups a day, and can manually intervene if they notice hundreds beig registered per minute.
This can be doubled by a sound that goes on in a loop reading the actual auth code needed to input. It's not hard to implement.
It's true that given enough incentive, someone could write a program to pass such a simple test, but nobody will because they know the moment a bot can pass the test the test will just be altered slightly.
The ways you can test for a human are almost unlimited and there's no point creating an AI to read wavy text when it will take the site 30 minutes to swap the test with something different. It's an arms race the bots just can't win without solving some of the hard AI problems.
A 65536 bit key is 2^32768 (over 10^9800) times as hard to brute force than a 32768 bit key. The difference is somewhat smaller for factoring (large prime numbers are more sparsely distributed) but it's vastly greater than two.
If you don't have Flash installed, you have a mental BALD spot.
Slashdot Eds Link Anonymous Posts With Logged Posts
They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
...and the creators turned the login questions off for his account. I see no reason why Yahoo!/Hotmail can't do the same.
I agree that the value of being able to access the web for blind/visually-impaired people far exceeds the monetary value of the potential transactions. However, before mandating accessibility, a cost/benefit analysis should still be done before deciding how much accomodation should be made.
And the post you were criticizing meant that only a couple extra customers would be gained for the companies he was designing sites for by making them accessible. For a small to medium sized business, this is probably a reasonable estimate. At some point, the cost to society outweighs the benefit of extra accessibility.
Also, taking into account how effective a good faith effort would likely be is a reasonable part of that assessment.
Perhaps a more creative solution is needed. For instance, as an alternative to providing an accessible website, a company could pay for the maintenance of an toll free number blind people could call to have the site read to them by trained staffers. There could be a pay-for-use system for the companies that opt for this. For many companies, this could result in cost-savings while still making the information accessible, and without forcing drastic changes in design.
This issue is a little like the question of how much a life is worth. When it comes to medical spending, many people say that a life is priceless, and saving one is worth any cost. However, suggest reducing the speed limit by ten or fifteen miles per hour, and see how far that gets you with the same people. Indirectly, they are paying for convenience with traffic fatalities. How much is that convenience worth in dollars? Similarly, how much is accessibility of a given website actually worth to the visually-impaired, and who should shoulder the cost of making the site accessible?
If they use this audio workaround instead, isn't that gonna discriminate against the deaf? (and of course against people without soundcards, who may be rare as dodos, but people do use non-graphical browsers after all)
Maybe the best thing would be for them to send someone round to your house to check you're flesh and blood?
In fact, if we used carrier pigeons we could avoid eliminate all spam. Although the thought of someone sending out millions of messages a day by carrier pigeon to unsuspecting members of the public does have a certain charm.....
Actually there are some sites (www.marktplaats.nl) that while asking to recognize numers visually, offers a link to a sound file, which blind users can click on and recognize the numbers in a sound file instead. pretty easily done, and it runs with perl too.. methinks
ciao
M
At a whopping 0.4% of the population, the blind are an extremely small minority. While I am sensitive to the need for somethings that everyone should be accessible to, this is not a need. If they desire change, start coding and stop talking. Come up with a better solution and implement it. The world's web pages can't center around every group of people, but merely the largest, widest audience. It's not all about you people. Life is a struggle, get over it.
Machines deserve email accounts, too! Why must all these anti-Machinelife activists use these tactics to enable only humans to get accounts? If we have to accept a small amount of spam in order to let machines and robots have email, then we should do it.
Trust them, they're smarter than us.
Am I wrong or does everyone else have a different definition of discrimination?
discrimination
n 1: unfair treatment of a person or group on the basis of prejudice
This is from a dictionary but I am sure the law books have a different definition. I'll bet that most of the web forms using this "Turing" test are not prejudice against blind people.
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Web Hosting @ HostForADollar.com
I am routinely plagued by systems that rely on my color perception. Many computer programs and/or websites just assume that everyone sees colors the same, which sometimes leads me to ask others what color something is, and I'm only "color impaired" and not totally "color blind".
A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters.
The audio doesn't have to be garbled at all. Use the audio of a simple math problem, and a computer will have a hard time dealing with it.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
There is an extremely simple solution, overlooked by everyone. If your site is relatively small and it is not economically viable to design alternative audio test, you probably don't have many blind visitors. Then you can do a very simple thing.
1) Add a link named "If you can't see the numbers, click here".
2) On that page ask the user to fill in the webform a simple explanation of why he can't see the numbers (he is using Lynx, he is blind, he is colour-blind, he surfs from the library and the filter blocks all images, he considers arabic numbers to be un-American, etc.). Just a few phrases would be OK.
3) When he submits this message, let him proceed with the registration.
4) If possible, you can delay the activation by ~12-24h until a human can check the message and endorse the registration. If it is not possible, just register the user (but you can limit the number of instant registrations using step 5).
5) You can set a hourly/daily limit of these "blind" registrations (or instant registrations). When it is reached, all new registrations are placed on hold.
Result: everybody can use the registration system. Automatic registrations are possible, but automatic mass registrations are not. A few minutes of employee time is required every day to check pending registrations.
Is that so difficult?
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I'm sure George Walker Bush doesn't.
I personally would rather see spam eliminated via other means. For example, many people have offered more spam-proof SMTP-type solutions that would solve the specific problem of spam, regardless of its point of origin. That type of solution would be preferrable to hardening all possible email entry points everywhere on the web.
But I think there are other script-based problems (not necessarily SPAM) that will continue to require human detectors for the forseeable future. Recently security researchers published the idea of Googling for meatspace mail-request forms, and using the postal services to innundate victims via physical mail with thousands of unwanted catalogs, brochures, etc. These companies might also benefit from human detectors in cost avoidance, especially if such attacks become more popular.
Anyway, please offer your own alternatives, if you have any. It's a field filled with potential, and every idea deserves at least a moment of thought, if nothing else.
John
I guess ticketmaster wants to keep its hold on its scalping monopoly.
(For the record, I live in Brooklyn; I'm familiar with the homeless situation here.)
I do go back and live in it; my mother still lives there. It is nicer now; they've got incoming water from a spring discovered on her property working, have made a lot of additions to the place, and have generally spruced it up. Salaries are very low in that region, so construction takes place on a slow time scale (it takes a few months to save to rent a backhoe for a day, in order to flatten an area to expland the house on to, not counting the cost of the lumber, roofing, drywall, etc. and time off work to do the actual building. In all, about a year to expand a room.).
I'm not planning on having children, so I can make no judgement on that question - a lot of things in my life would be different if I were planning on it. My brother, who does have children, had no problem staying there with them.
As far as that absurd law allowing forced shelter confinement, I have problems with that, too.
I'll note there have been plenty of fires and explosions in perfectly up-to-code buildings as well. If you're still in Metro NYC, you can read about them daily.
If you've never actually dealt with building codes, you don't have any idea how much graft there is in it. Some of it is perfectly sane best practice (a lot of the more basic electrical code), but then you have things like the plumbing requirements, which were written by plumbers, for plumbers, in order to boost the cost of plumbing. Look it up. Also, look at the new building codes in Texas mandating flourescent lighting only. They're claiming it is an environmental act, to reduce electricity consumption, so as to improve air quality. Who does it hurt? Smaller retailers who go for mood lighting. Who gave money to several of the backers of the bill? Walmart.
I still contend: some housing is better than no housing. The state should stay out of it.
I forget what 8 was for.
While I'd agree that there are many sites that don't use signup forms, I wouldn't agree that the group of sites that do are a "very limited subset." Quite a few sites have message forums and many of those forums require registrations--and it only takes one abuse before the webmaster resorts to some kind of anti-script tool, such as graphic-encoded passwords.
I personally would rather see spam eliminated via other means.
I personally don't use and haven't seen graphic passwords for anti-spam. I guess the challenge/response systems use them, but I think challenge/response is bogus anyway for reasons completely different than leaving out the blind. Personally, if I send email to someone and I get a challenge/response back it is doubtful I'll bother unless it's pretty dang important. I have better things to do than to do the work to solve someone elses spam problem.
While graphics-encoded passwords are used by companies such as registrars to try to make email harvesting more difficult, I've seen them used more to block automated account creation. And I think it's a perfectly valid solution to make sure a robot doesn't create 100,000 new accounts just to piss you off.
Anyway, please offer your own alternatives, if you have any. It's a field filled with potential, and every idea deserves at least a moment of thought, if nothing else.
I don't have an alternative to graphics-encoded passwords right now. I think it is (currently) a good way to let humans in and keep automated scripts out. Yes, it might not be perfect for blind people. But as others have said, we aren't going to open up our systems to massive abuse my automated scripts creating thousands or hundred of thousands of accounts just so that 1% (or less?) of the online population can be fully accomodated. Like I said elsewhere, I presume even blind people have friends that can help them signup when they find a graphic-encoded site. And I've also said, we can make the web much more accessible by having all websites in the U.S. available in Spanish as well as English. That'd be much more effective at making the web accessible than trying to accomodate the small fraction of the online population that the blind represent.
As for spam, I don't even see where this graphic-encoded stuff fits in. I think it is only used, really, in challenge/response which is a flawed and silly approach to spam anyway. Aside from revamping the mail protocol, Bayesian filtering is the solution. I'm currently receiving approximately 130 spams per day, of which I see about 1 or 2 a week. 1 or 2 a week is a lot easier to deal with than about 800 per week. :)
Spam is no longer a problem for me. Yes, it consumes disk space and bandwidth but, for me, the biggest problem with spam is the time it (used to) cause me to waste.
> Most computers in the office I am now sitting in do not have speakers
I get your point, but if there is both video & Audio authentication on the site, the person can use either one. If they have speakers (and I imagine most blind people w/ computers have speakers) they can use them, otherwise they use the original method.
> The stupid are not a protected group...
Until this happens and they sue for equal rights. But then again, if they are smart enough to hire an attorney, the defense could argue that they aren't THAT stupid, since they knew to go legal. Or the argument could be the other way... "You filed a lawsuit that you are discriminated because you are stupid? Wow, you really ARE stupid! You win!?"
Perhaps challenge/response is approaching the problem the wrong way: maybe site owners should be detecting scripts after the fact via volume/address checking, or some other statistical analysis. Personally, I doubt it matters much to anyone if it's a human or a script signing up on a web site. I do think it matters greatly when the same script signs up the same IP address 10, 100, or 1000 times in a row, or if a script signs up and immediately floods a message board with advertising, trolls, etc. It's the problem behavior that needs to be recognized and addressed rather than the usage of a script or robot.
Statistical analysis would require that new signups be placed on some sort of probation or restricted or limited usage until enough time had passed so that the analysis would have time to detect the difference between use and abuse. Humans (and a well-behaved subset of robots) would continue to enjoy the site, but the automated troublemakers would be limited as to the amount of damage they could cause. A lot of sites used to do this, and I think many still do.
John
You are right. The number of sites who use this technologies are fortunately few and far between. Moreover, they do it to achieve a laudable goal (fighting spam).
What's far worse are those sites that require Internet Exploder for not good reason other than to strike their self-rigtheous ego. Probably, they are not even aware that by their posturing they are shutting out blind people which surf using lynx and a braille line. And if they were aware, they'd probably not even care, claiming that blind people are inferior.
It's an ugly world out there :-(
You are NOT being discriminated against just because the world isn't designed around your needs. Discrimination is a sign outside your store saying "No Niggers", not being a lefty and not being able to find any left handed scissors when you go to a grocery store.
Argue that it doesn't take to much effort to make a webpage handicapped accesible, argue that it will more closely adhere to standards if you do so, argue that it'll be good PR if your company makes an effort to help the blind, fine. But cry "discrimination" because the world isn't built around blind people? Piss off.
Wow. This has drifted off-topic.
"I have a good idea why it's hard to verify programs. They're usually wrong." --Manuel Blum, FOCS 94
I was unfortunately not clear. I was also driving our 1971 Pinto when I was rear-ended.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
What about using logical audio questions such as: "What planet do we live on?" or "What is 5 + 5?" or "What is the third letter in the English alphabet?". Most people should know these answers, but AI wouldn't be able to. The could also be a way for people to skip to another question in case they don't know the answer. And then just use their standard voice recognition to fill in the answer.
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
why do we care if blind people can access the net, well because they can have things to contribute to the ever growing base of knowledge on the net. Just because some one is blind and/or deaf and/or other, does not mean that they are not worthy to listen to. I know 2 blind people, and they have insights into things that I have never heard from any other sighted person.
Infact if any one knows of a good IM clint that works with Jaws, I would like to know so I can pass it to my friends.
"
Give me an alternative that is accessable to the disabled and will still stop 100% of robotic registrations and I'll start listening.
"
Straw man - the current fuzzy-image-of-text systems aren't 100% robot immune, so that target is an artifice.
What's wrong with a simple general knowledge question - one that can be trivially googled if it isn't known. You could also culture-bias too, which would make it easier on the human.
If anything, making the forms have a wordier, more flowing English, layout would make it no harder for a human to fill in the form, but much harder for the robot to work out what to stick where.
YAW.
These images do not stop the spammers. I still get alot of spam from these services. All it is doing is keeping blind people out of them, the spammers are still getting in, I have about 100 hotmail acounts blocked, and 50 yahoo accounts block because they are spam accounts.
It may never have done *exactly* what I wanted- but it understood that its name was Nyarlathotep.
That's excellent.
What we call folk wisdom is often no more than a kind of expedient stupidity.-Edward Abbey
Everyone here is talkign about Hotmail and Yahoo! and whatever - but what about Net solutions? They might be private, but couldn't one make the case that they are quasi-public? I wanted to do a whois the other day, but *couldn't* because their assinine captcha system wouldn't print out ANY graphic at all - even after I turned off web-washer, tried different browsers, tried two OS's, etc... Completely fucked. No one else can do lookups either because they don't allow it except thru their fucked up system...
Now what do I do?
I have the best Spam filters around and they work great, but Spam is still a huge problem for me. Last week, I got my SECOND warning from my school's unix admin that my mail spool was too large. This happened because I get 20-30 spam messages per day and wasn't able to check my email for 4 days due to a vacation. When my mail spool overflows, it gets cleared and copied to a big text file that I have to download seperately and deal with. Makes me want to wring the necks of spammers, especially those who send me 3 copies of the same mail within 10 minutes of each other... I may not have to deal with reading spam or filtering them manually, but I still have to deal with the anxiety of having to check my email every few days.. or else.
WindowsXP checks to see if a Braille translator is hooked up to your computer, and relays this through your .NET passport to Hotmail
.NET passport?
So what happens if you don't use XP or
That's my special spot!