Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

How Would You Design a Captcha for the Deaf-Blind?

Posted by Cliff on from the an-oversight-isn't-necessarily-discrimination dept.

kesuki asks: "Right now, the state of the art captcha only works for the visually-abled. Some people are trying to start a grass roots opposition to catcha using existing anti-discrimination laws. However, without any captcha at all, spammers would have a field day. Audio captcha would work for the blind, of course, but they still leave out the deaf-blind using brail interpreters to use their computers and navigate the web. What system of captcha can you dream up that would work for the deaf-blind?"

3 of 99 comments (clear)

  1. My 2 cents... by markild · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I'm sorry to say this, but this sounds like a extremely narrow question.

    For instance: What website with content for deaf-blind (_only_ text) would require registration to retrieve such information?
    Yeah, I know (from TFA) some blogs have captcha registration, but do they require registration?

    Anywho, my answer. Hire an assistant/interpreter. That would probably be much cheaper, and much easier.
    Either that, or I would send the authors of the web-site a e-mail, and if it's not a heavy traffic one, they could probably help you out, even though you can't read the captcha.

    --
    Scully: Should we arrest David Copperfield?
    Mulder: Yes we should, but not for this.
  2. Re:A math question by Scorchio · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The trick is to add enough variations to make automated parsing difficult. Plus, throw a few word based questions in there...

    What is 6 minus the sum of 2 and 2?
    Is 2 higher than eighteen?
    Which of the following is an animal? Brick, horse, factory, sky.
    Type four letter Q's then the letter N.
    How many P's in pineapple? ...and so on. Not so easy to write an automated parser if there's a few thousand variations to cope with.

  3. A phone number by hoggoth · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Pretty simple really. For the incredibly small percentage of the population that is both deaf and blind you supply a phone number to a braille tele-type service (whatever the standard is for deaf-blind communications). You hire one person to handle all the calls, and give him something else to do while he's waiting for the teletype to ring.
    Perhaps do this as a service for ALL interested web sites to share.

    Sometimes we geeks forget that everthing doesn't have to be solved by high-tech wizardry.

    --
    - For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat /dev/random (may take some time)