Anti-Spam Webforms Leave Out The Blind 757
geekee writes "An article on CNET claims that a technique whereby a user enters a code word displayed in an image in order to register for a service such as an e-mail account discriminates against the blind. Advocacy groups for the blind are even hinting at lawsuits against companies using this practice. A proposed audio workaround for the blind still has problems since it has to be garbled to the point where most people can't understand it to prevent a computer from recognizing the letters. Brings up some interesting issues surrounding the Turing test."
Turing Test? (Score:4, Interesting)
Turing test (Score:2, Interesting)
How much to concede to please everyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
This reminds me of new 25-cent public bathrooms tested by New York City awhile back. You paid 25 cents to go use it, and it cleaned itself and smelled great and so on. Then people in wheelchairs complained they couldn't use them (because they were too small), and were being discriminated against. So, the company made a larger version. Except now, you had bums popping in a quarter, and having a free room for the night. More lawsuits ensued.
When will it stop?
Case in point: (Score:5, Interesting)
And yes, I can see how this can be viewed as discriminatory, but the problem of devising an alternative is far from trivial.
*sigh* (Score:2, Interesting)
solved (Score:4, Interesting)
Sounds like a good solution to me! Besides, if they do this for the blind, and use that audio test thing instead, the deaf will be all over them.
A better way... (Score:5, Interesting)
"Thirteen red small dogs went to the zoo."
What size were they? (to which the answer would be "small")
You could mix and match questions and adjectives to keep spammers on their toes. The only drawback is that this is only effective for as long as you have a bigger dictionary system than the spammers. Using a larger sentence or paragraph with more complexities should help.
"[count] [color] [size] [age] object [and [count] [color] [size] [age] [object]
Solution ask a question? (Score:2, Interesting)
What is the first vowel in your last name? (leave blank for none)
If you added all the digits in you phone number up what would be their sum?
I am sure some text to speech software could produce good text, and someone could parse the sentence, but if you randomized the questions enough it should deter most automated attacks.
Then again these type of questions may offend those who just can't figure out the answers.
Re:Monitors. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:2, Interesting)
So basically, you want a company offering a free service to go out of their way, spend thousands of dollars and man-hours to create a system for the blind that won't benefit their company? Sure, it would be nice if humanity was that kind, but its not.
Tactile graphic display? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Hold on...after a little Googling, I found this instance of the exact thing I'm proposing [nist.gov]. Go and buy it, blind people! And not just for anti-spam graphics; as with any new medium, just imagine the pr0n possibilities.)
discriminatory? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were to provide a service (even a paying one) of some sort (for example a dog wash) but then require that any customer that wants to use my service and pay me for it must hop once on their left legg as a way of verifying that they are in fact a biped and not a snake in a human disguise (just go with it). . . this would clearly be discriminatory against people missing their left legg. But that doesn't mean that I am some how liable financially or legally! I just have a clumsy authentication system and need to improve it. If I don't, then the left legged people of my town will go somewhere else to get their dog washed.
robi
Re:Turing test (Score:4, Interesting)
These little distorted text images are cheap automated Turing Tests that work quite well for our current level of AI. What's your problem?
Selfish Bigotry Gets Tagged As "Interesting"?? (Score:2, Interesting)
And why do you presume that assisting sightless people will inconvenience the seeing?
(It's indicative of the smelly nature of
friends? (Score:4, Interesting)
b) sites like yahoo could make a work around, you could call up for a username and password
c) the turing test only has to be passed once. i've never had to pass it a second time, once i'm a verified human being i'm verified... so why can't the blind have someone do it for them the first time? it would even be cheaper than hiring a lawyer, exspecially for a case they are going to loose.
Re:What's the big deal? (Score:1, Interesting)
And as my proposal for a better solution is: "which of these things is not like the other", with some large secret DB of things and properties:
cat - animal, carnivore, mammal, three-letter-word
horse - animal, carnivore, mammal, five-letter-word
shark - animal, carnivore, five-letter-word
chair - furniture, seat, single-user, five-letter-word
couch - furniture, seat, multi-user, five-letter-word
desktop computer - gadget, single-user, two-word-phrase, office
server - gadget, multi-user, six-letter-word, office
keyboard - gadget, single-user, office, long-word
whisk - gadget, single-user, kitchen, five-letter-word
spoon - gadget, single-user, kitchen, five-letter-word
(whisk, keyboard, couch, horse): which one of these is not like the others? Keyboard is not a five-letter-word. What about (whisk, keyboard, couch, cat): A cat is an animal. (spoon, server, shark, whisk): All but whisk start with s.
Sure, bad guys could come up with their own DBs, but it will be tough to come up with the same set of attributes.
Re:Monitors. - actually... (Score:2, Interesting)
Wait a sec.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sound? (Score:5, Interesting)
So not only is this approach discriminatory, but a short-term measure that won't work in the long run.
What IS unique to humans, that machines have little or no chance to emulate and master in the forseeable future? Abstractions, perhaps? Arts? Or humour? Trivia that can't easily be answered by a machine would be one way to go.
To prove that you're human, answer this:
- In Alice in Wonderland, Alice fell down into a?
- Who's the boss of the strip of land south of Canada?
- To gain access to this site,
please identify,
the type of verse this text is.
- What would be an appropriate response to "Knock, knock"?
- What's the air speed velocity of a coconut-laden swallow?
Even better would be questions without fixed answers:
- What's your name spelled backwards?
- Who won yesterday's baseball match between the Mariners and the Mets?
- How many points did NASDAQ rise or fall yesterday?
- What's tomorrow's date? Please reply in the form "February 13, 2003"?
Block for a minute every time there's a wrong answer, since people are prone to error, but might accept waiting a minute more than a machine would. Add new questions every day, and drop off old ones before they can be fed into machines by humans.
And, most important, provide a human-to-human contact method as a fallback to prove your species, if everything else fails.
Regards,
--
*Art
Re:Monitors. - actually... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Sooo.... (Score:3, Interesting)
"My butcher isn't going to start a produce section for vegetarians"
1) People are vegetarian by choice, not handicap.
2) The vegetarian can still buy meat from the butcher, even if they don't want to eat it.
3) The butcher, by being open to the public, has to serve the general public without practicing racial, religious, sexual, or handicap-based discrimination. (By law)
4) The butcher has to provide _resonable_ accomadations to the handicapped. (By law.) He doesn't have to perform miracles.
You might be surprized at the amount of stuff handicapped people do. I know a blind skier, so you can't know ahead of time which site need accessiblity. Half the rock musicians out there are deaf. (or at least tone deaf.)
All they need to do is have a phone line / TTYD with a real live human on it for folks that can't see the test image. (Or something like that.)
rbb
Why no "Braille" Display? (Score:3, Interesting)
Which brings up a point... what're the only other senses left? Well, touch, taste, and smell. Taste and smell are probably not well suited to the interpretation of data... but we already know that touch can be. Braille and raised lettering on important signs is generally considered one mark of an accessible building. There's braille terminals even, as anyone who'se seen the movie Sneakers knows.
So... why isn't there a tactile "braille" image renderer available? You've seen those toys with thousands of little small rods that you impress an object into, and the rods are displaced by it and on the other side you see (or feel!) an "image" of the object. Hook something like this up to an electromechanical device for lowering and raising the rods based on the intensity of a grayscaled image, and you've got a tactile image display. Accessibility problem solved. Even for blind/deaf folks.
Now, once the smell-o-vision is invented, we can take it futher...
Re:Monitors. (Score:2, Interesting)
It seems that a simple solution would be to also provide a phone number someone could call (and read, using a braille web reader) to also activate the account.
As you say, these images will only work for so long anyway.
Re:Case in point: (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:No michael means happy /. readers (Score:2, Interesting)
We'll ignore the obvious stupidity when it comes to filling forms in to start with. Surely blind people know SOMEONE who can see. It's not that hard to grab someone and say "can you type in what that says".
I'm colourblind. The fire service where I used to live discriminated against me where I live by not hiring me due to my defective colour receptors, someone call a lawyer.
I have a very rare form of colourblindness. My wife has to help with a lot of stuff involving colours (note that magic word, HELP), I failed to get into the air force due to this and my hearing... "Oh, someone call Lionel Hutz, I've been discriminated against..."
I feel for the blind, I really do. I've had some blind acquaintances, but this is just ridiculous.
Maybe I should sue someone because, by not being blind, I can't be a piano virtuoso like Stevie Wonder...
This was a programming assignment at UNSW (Score:1, Interesting)
Many of the solutions involved creative forms of l33t, many asked common-sense type questions, and the best ones were based on comprehension tests as described in earlier comments.
There was one cool one I remember which presented a list of sentences, most of which were nonsense with psuedo-grammatical constructions, and the rest of which were convoluted but made sense. The reader was asked to pick which ones made sense. It 's not perfect but it's a cool idea.
It's a really interesting problem.
New audio test (Score:1, Interesting)
Why not an audio test such as:
"What do you get if you add three to twenty five?"
or something similar. It just needs to involve some thought but can still be very trivial for a human.