On Wed, 28 Jul 2010, John Hasler wrote: > Joshua D. Drake writes: >> Captcha is pretty common. It isn't discrimination.
It is, starting in the sense that hotels with only steps to reach the lobby and no ramps, discriminate against those who find wheelchairs to be more useful than legs. It goes a step further, however. The hotel in this hypothetical could only be redesigned at significant expense, and if there had been much thought put into the matter, ramps would have probably been installed from the outset (or something similar). For the same reasons (lack of forethought, or the consideration that the disabled are a big enough market), captchas came into wide use, even though research is showing that they are more and more easy for computers to crack, or people to crack and then feed to computers. However, it is unlikely that you will find a new hotel designed today without a ramp, and to fail to include one would most certainly be called discrimination. Why should not the same standard be applied to the web? I say that, while being mostly opposed in every possible way to the regulation of web content by governments. So I guess I expect content providers to come to it on their own. Still, I think that once the problem is pointed out to a site designer, a failure to do something about it is without a doubt discriminatory. (I am not claiming that the above is what is happening in this situation.) > It's common but it still discriminates against the blind. I don't know > what else to do, though. Maybe ask the user to solve a simple word > problem? One thing I've seen, is the regular captcha, with a link which leads one to a "can't see the image?" page, which then presents a text captcha. Text captchas are much more easily cached and cracked, however, so this is a stop gap measure at best. The math sort cause trouble for the spammers, however, because they require programming. Email validation, form fields with random names which must be left blank in order to validate the submission, and so on, are ways of minimizing the effect of captcha false negatives, making text alternatives more acceptable. Luke ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Palm PDK Hot Apps Program offers developers who use the Plug-In Development Kit to bring their C/C++ apps to Palm for a share of $1 Million in cash or HP Products. Visit us here for more details: http://p.sf.net/sfu/dev2dev-palm _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-devel
