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How Would You Design a Captcha for the Deaf-Blind?
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?"
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.
Okay, this is a shameless plug, but I started work sometime ago on http://aomis.net/ (I won't href it). Anyways, the idea was instead of CAPTCHA, which I don't really like, I thought why not let users identify different types of media. Now, I hadn't considered folks who were blind and deaf, but I did build the system to handle multiple types of media, like pictures and audio, which would help folks that are blind or deaf, but not both.
Now, the sites not quite ready, I'm still playing with a few things, like getting more media into it, but I'll have to watch this Ask Slashdot for good ideas on how to handle those who are blind and deaf.
"If you cannot view this Captcha, please email foo@bar.com [spam assasin'd, of course], or call 0800-1234-567"
My UID is prime. Is yours?
The trick is to add enough variations to make automated parsing difficult. Plus, throw a few word based questions in there...
...and so on. Not so easy to write an automated parser if there's a few thousand variations to cope with.
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?
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
So, if I understand this right, you need a computer to be able to randomly generate a question and corresponding answer from scratch (pulling it out of a database would presumably just lead to the spammers cataloguing all of the question componenets), but on the other hand, you need a computer to not be able to work out the answer when given just the question.
My best idea is to get it to generate long-winded English sentences along the lines of this:
It would probably be a lot easier to just have a human being read each post and make sure it's not spam before displaying it publicly though, as is the case with moderated newsgroups.
At the rate we're headed, it seems like pretty soon Google will be able to whip up a robot that can beat the Turing test or Voight-Kampff empathy test.