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The hardest captcha I've come across is the audio one used by Google on https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount. C

The hardest captcha I've come across is the audio one used by Google on https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount https://www.google.com/accounts/NewAccount. Click the little wheelchair icon to hear it. It's so hard to decipher, it almost comes across as a cruel joke at the expense of blind people. These are much easier, in that I can actually understand them.

derrida 16y ago
I will say... "additional plugins required". If your blind you will miss that.
brlewis 16y ago
Once at MIT a blind student was showing me his screen reader. I couldn't make sense of the sounds at all, and asked if it was in some special code. He said no, it was normal language, just really fast. He had it read the current line on his terminal (this was late '80s). I could see the words it was supposedly reading, but I still couldn't map them to the brief burst of sound that came from the screen reader. So maybe if you've been blind a while, the audio captcha isn't so hard to decipher. Keep in mind they have to make it hard for speech recognition software to decipher too.
- battlehorse 16y ago
  A few years back I attended a tech talk from T.V.Raman (of emacspeak fame) and he was making fun of us, poor non-blind users, for being so slow at deciphering the bursts of sounds from the screen reader. He, and other blind computer scientists that were present at the talk, was so used to the screen reader that could crank its speed up to impossible speeds for non-blind users (that don't exercise their hearing sense that much). The same applied to the tiny distortions in pitch and tone that he'd use as a replacement for syntax coloring. Pretty amazing.
- tomkarlo 16y ago
  (Was it Sam H.?) When I was at MIT I had a lab partner who was blind for I think 6.002 or 6.003. I remember that one side-effect of using a screen reader was that he easily "recited" code, which I don't think most sighted programmers could do fluently. Of course, in order to understand what he was reciting, my only hope was generally to try to type it into a text editor, format it and look at it. (And it's also hard to transcribe code being read to you.)
  - brlewis 16y ago
    It wasn't Sam H. I don't recall his name.
  - thwarted 16y ago
    My mom and I used to take turns reading the code listings from magazines like Compute! and RUN to each other and typing them in. It took forever. I definitely find it harder to do that with punctuation heavy languages these days (not that I'm typing much code in from magazines anymore).
    - tomkarlo 16y ago
      Oh, god I remember doing that for the TRS-80 (was it assembly? that's what I remember.) You'd spend hours typing in codes from a magazine, and I think my Dad and I had about a 5% success rate actually getting the program to run at the end.
      - thwarted 16y ago
        Run often had BASIC programs that built machine language routines from DATA statements, just a series of numbers. At one point they changed the program so that one of the bytes in each DATA statement was a checksum, and it would tell you if the rest of the line was accurate or not. That helped a lot. My mom likes to say "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but you were actually learning something."
        mkramlich 16y ago
        That was my first introduction to the notion of checksums and parity bits too. Very practical, in your face, real world consequences kind of impact. Excellent way to learn the concept. I don't miss having to type in all my software by hand, but the sort of forced physical learning and in-your-face impact of syntax and data patterns was really effective and something we should miss.
    - mkramlich 16y ago
- pkulak 16y ago
  Yup, my sister is blind and it's the same thing. I hear her having something read off her screen and it's just way to fast to even notice a single word. I asked her about it once and she told me that she doesn't even have it set to read as fast as most of her friends!
  - StavrosK 16y ago
    Can you post an audio sample of this? I'd love to hear it.
- tassl 16y ago
  This might be a little bit off-topic, but has somebody played with the tools that blind cs programmers use to program? Read/write/navigate,... What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?
  - kinofcain 16y ago
    I used to do a lot of accessibility work, so I was somewhat proficient at JAWS and IBM's Home Page Reader. JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was readable, etc, there's a huge difference between "possible" and "easy". I thought it would be interesting, from an HCI perspective, to use a screen reader with something like a phone in your pocket, but sadly the learning curve is just too high, and there's not much motivation to improve it, either from the perspective of app/site developers (blind users are a rounding error) or even of the tool makers (blind users are highly motivated to learn their product, and will purchase it regardless of learning curve). SEO, ironically, is the greatest thing to ever happen to blind users. All those people with tremendous financial incentive to make their sites spiderable to a text-only bot.
    - chris_j 16y ago
      > JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was readable, etc, there's a huge difference between "possible" and "easy". Seconded. I've done a bit of accessibility testing work with JAWS and was often frustrated by how unnecessarily difficult it was to use the software with a screen reader. You have to remember that it is probably uneconomical to make most software accessible and companies only do it because it is a requirement that software be accessible if you want to sell to certain governments (eg the USA). What this means is that development and testing is focussed on doing the bare minimum needed to pass a checklist, after which there isn't any need to do anything, regardless of whether the software is "easy" or merely "possible" to use.
rararational 16y ago
The normal google captcha is pretty damn hard, once I had to go through like 5 or 10 before I got it though lately it seems to have gotten a little bit easier (or I now know how to guess it better).
qeorge 16y ago
I assume its because audio captchas are so easy to break with a computer (hence you have to distort the hell out of it): http://blog.wintercore.com/2008/03/05/breaking-gmails-audio-captcha/ http://blog.wintercore.com/2008/03/05/breaking-gmails-audio-...
markneub 16y ago
This CAPTCHA is actually designed to ensure that the only entity that can decipher it is Satan himself. Wow.
SoftwareMaven 16y ago
Am I the only one that hears this like a Black Sabbath record being played backwards? I tried a couple of them and noticed no appreciable difference in the noise being presented.

derrida 16y ago

I will say... "additional plugins required". If your blind you will miss that.

brlewis 16y ago

Once at MIT a blind student was showing me his screen reader. I couldn't make sense of the sounds at all, and asked if it was in some special code. He said no, it was normal language, just really fast. He had it read the current line on his terminal (this was late '80s). I could see the words it was supposedly reading, but I still couldn't map them to the brief burst of sound that came from the screen reader. So maybe if you've been blind a while, the audio captcha isn't so hard to decipher. Keep in mind they have to make it hard for speech recognition software to decipher too.

battlehorse 16y ago
A few years back I attended a tech talk from T.V.Raman (of emacspeak fame) and he was making fun of us, poor non-blind users, for being so slow at deciphering the bursts of sounds from the screen reader. He, and other blind computer scientists that were present at the talk, was so used to the screen reader that could crank its speed up to impossible speeds for non-blind users (that don't exercise their hearing sense that much). The same applied to the tiny distortions in pitch and tone that he'd use as a replacement for syntax coloring. Pretty amazing.
tomkarlo 16y ago
(Was it Sam H.?) When I was at MIT I had a lab partner who was blind for I think 6.002 or 6.003. I remember that one side-effect of using a screen reader was that he easily "recited" code, which I don't think most sighted programmers could do fluently. Of course, in order to understand what he was reciting, my only hope was generally to try to type it into a text editor, format it and look at it. (And it's also hard to transcribe code being read to you.)
- brlewis 16y ago
  It wasn't Sam H. I don't recall his name.
- thwarted 16y ago
  My mom and I used to take turns reading the code listings from magazines like Compute! and RUN to each other and typing them in. It took forever. I definitely find it harder to do that with punctuation heavy languages these days (not that I'm typing much code in from magazines anymore).
  - tomkarlo 16y ago
    Oh, god I remember doing that for the TRS-80 (was it assembly? that's what I remember.) You'd spend hours typing in codes from a magazine, and I think my Dad and I had about a 5% success rate actually getting the program to run at the end.
    - thwarted 16y ago
      Run often had BASIC programs that built machine language routines from DATA statements, just a series of numbers. At one point they changed the program so that one of the bytes in each DATA statement was a checksum, and it would tell you if the rest of the line was accurate or not. That helped a lot. My mom likes to say "I was just having fun, typing in the games and playing them, but you were actually learning something."
      - mkramlich 16y ago
        That was my first introduction to the notion of checksums and parity bits too. Very practical, in your face, real world consequences kind of impact. Excellent way to learn the concept. I don't miss having to type in all my software by hand, but the sort of forced physical learning and in-your-face impact of syntax and data patterns was really effective and something we should miss.
  - mkramlich 16y ago
pkulak 16y ago
Yup, my sister is blind and it's the same thing. I hear her having something read off her screen and it's just way to fast to even notice a single word. I asked her about it once and she told me that she doesn't even have it set to read as fast as most of her friends!
- StavrosK 16y ago
  Can you post an audio sample of this? I'd love to hear it.
tassl 16y ago
This might be a little bit off-topic, but has somebody played with the tools that blind cs programmers use to program? Read/write/navigate,... What I mean is, has somebody any insight if it would be worth it, from a productivity point of view, to use those tools for non-blind people?
- kinofcain 16y ago
  I used to do a lot of accessibility work, so I was somewhat proficient at JAWS and IBM's Home Page Reader. JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was readable, etc, there's a huge difference between "possible" and "easy". I thought it would be interesting, from an HCI perspective, to use a screen reader with something like a phone in your pocket, but sadly the learning curve is just too high, and there's not much motivation to improve it, either from the perspective of app/site developers (blind users are a rounding error) or even of the tool makers (blind users are highly motivated to learn their product, and will purchase it regardless of learning curve). SEO, ironically, is the greatest thing to ever happen to blind users. All those people with tremendous financial incentive to make their sites spiderable to a text-only bot.
  - chris_j 16y ago
    > JAWS, in particular, is quite powerful, but pretty daunting to learn. Compounding the clunkiness of JAWS is that many apps and sites aren't built with screen reader usability in mind – even if the developers made a good effort to ensure that it was possible to use their site in a screen reader, that all text was readable, etc, there's a huge difference between "possible" and "easy". Seconded. I've done a bit of accessibility testing work with JAWS and was often frustrated by how unnecessarily difficult it was to use the software with a screen reader. You have to remember that it is probably uneconomical to make most software accessible and companies only do it because it is a requirement that software be accessible if you want to sell to certain governments (eg the USA). What this means is that development and testing is focussed on doing the bare minimum needed to pass a checklist, after which there isn't any need to do anything, regardless of whether the software is "easy" or merely "possible" to use.

rararational 16y ago

The normal google captcha is pretty damn hard, once I had to go through like 5 or 10 before I got it though lately it seems to have gotten a little bit easier (or I now know how to guess it better).

qeorge 16y ago

I assume its because audio captchas are so easy to break with a computer (hence you have to distort the hell out of it): http://blog.wintercore.com/2008/03/05/breaking-gmails-audio-captcha/ http://blog.wintercore.com/2008/03/05/breaking-gmails-audio-...

markneub 16y ago

This CAPTCHA is actually designed to ensure that the only entity that can decipher it is Satan himself. Wow.

SoftwareMaven 16y ago

Am I the only one that hears this like a Black Sabbath record being played backwards? I tried a couple of them and noticed no appreciable difference in the noise being presented.