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Comment by throwaway1979 | Hacker News Reader

throwaway1979

Google's captcha system is horrid. I've mentioned this to people on the accessibility team but to no avail. They used to have a wheel chair icon next to the bloody scrambled text. I taught a computer class to seniors and it was painful watching them deal with the account sign up process (also, I thought it was insulting asking a mobile senior to click on the wheel chair icon ... to the designer ... FU!). Clicking on the wheel chair would give audio that barely made any sense to me. The whole process was stupid.

Like many others, I can barely get through their captcha service. I'm actually happy people circumvented it. Maybe someone will think it through this time around.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Symbol_of_Access

OK. Show me a CAPTCHA that is easy for humans to read, and very difficult for computers to read.

It shouldn't be about being able to "read". Ideally it should be something that only human could "solve". May be stupid example, but I can't come up with a better one (and if I could, I would be a lot wealthier by now ;) ): show a picture where a forest in landscape is violet and ask a user to identify what's odd on that picture. Another example, show a face with two noses. Ask them to identify the odd item. Things like that. Easy for human, impossible for computers. The problem is that these tasks need to be generated by humans, as I cannot think of any (irreversable) way to do this automatically. May be mechanical turk to the rescue?

> Like many others, I can barely get through their captcha service. I'm actually happy people circumvented it. Maybe someone will think it through this time around.

Anytime you're ready, we're listening.

Well, chances are it'll get even harder now, not easier since they'll need to add further complexity to differentiate humans from bots.

I also thought that was insulting with the wheel chair icon. A person in a wheel chair has problems walking, not (necessarily) their vision. How about "Help" in text?...less confusion and possible anger

Apparently the wheel chair is actually an ISO standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Symbol_of_Access

But it's a symbol for mobility - not for all disabilities.

There are symbols for visual impairment, but they're not international.

(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pictograms-nps-access...)

(http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-HfEx4Y_O_Gs/Tf0huVPZBXI/AAAAAAAAAC...)

Since the point of the audio version is not to be hit with lawsuits under the ADA - perhaps it should just be a little icon of a lawyer?

I imaging that whole sites could be designed using only your proposed lawyer icon, possibly with some additional icon representing political correctness.

What's the international symbol for a lawyer?

https://www.google.com/search?q=parasite+icon

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