Re: FOSSExperts

[Luke <..hidden..>]

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