digg: Darn! The picture and your input did not match up.
In these times when having an user account at any of the social bookmarking sites is a normal thing for
any internet savvy person, I also tried to join the party. at http://www.digg.com. Like any membership based site, digg also want that its users must be real persons. Usual, every website would want that. What is the method to insure that the registrant is indeed a human? Yes, you guessed right! “CAPTCHA”!.
For those who don’t know what are captchas, captcha means “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”. For more info on captcha, see the wikipedia page.
The most popular type of captcha is visual captchas, a distorted image on which some letters are printed and the visiters are asked to type the text in the distorted image to verify that indeed they are human. But unfortunately, this test doesn’t proves that the visitor is in deed a human, instead it proves that the visitor can read the distorted image. “hey humans should be able to read the image. right?”. Most of the times, yes. The human visitors are able to read the text in the distorted image. But not all humans
can, blind visitors certainly can not. Even sometimes a person with normal site can not comprehend these captchas, They say.
“Hey! there are audio captchas available. Right?”.
Yes, there are audio captchas available and many sites
does use them as an alternative verification method including gmail and digg.com to name some.
Although it is a right and welcome step that these big sites are providing an accessible method to traditional captcha, just providing them isn’t good enough. The average blind persons should be able to understand the cryptic audio, the spoken text. Where gmail’s audio captcha does well in this regard, audio
captchas provided by many sites including digg.com doesn’t work well at all! digg isn’t the only site, couple of months ago, I tryed another site where I could not get in even after trying many times (don’t remember the name, wasn’t that important site to me).
Here is what I experienced while attempting to break the digg audio captcha.
After providing the basic information like username and email etc, I was asked the following question.
* Are You Human? Enter the text you see in the image. Alt+7
Yes! I am indeed a human!
If you can’t read this, try listening to the audio version or email support at digg.com for help.
Can’t read the text? Listen to it
Ok Let me try to listen it
I listened, entered the letters which I could understand and pressed the submit button.
Darn! The picture and your input did not match up.
That was the response from the server. OK. Let me try once again and see what happens.
Darn! The picture and your input did not match up.
I tried it few times and failed. Today also I tried with the same result. And decided to write up here. I have decided that I will not drag a sited person into this digg captcha solving game, instead would prefer to not have a digg account. Having a digg account isn’t that important as having an email account. right? I will be trying to get through the digg gate keeper. Hopefully, I will succeed!
What makes the digg’s audio captcha so bad?
Simple, use of alphabets. Yes, using alphabets for audio captchas is a very bad option because differentiating between alike sounding letters can be really troublesome. For example, “c”, “z”, “p”, “b”, “e” etc. For an international site like digg, using numbers is the best option. That’s why the gmail’s audio captcha isn’t that hard to understand.
To all those sites who are implementing audio captchas or are planning to implement one, please try to do a real world test of there audio captcha systems. Specially those big big sites. Any blind person shouldn’t have to try the audio captcha more than third time. If even after trying 3 times the blind tester can not create an account on the site, take off that captcha it is just taking the valuable server resources and is not availing any benefit to anyone.
Will post here once I have successfully created an account on digg. I am not going to give up!
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Tags: Accessibility, captcha, digg, Web
August 17th, 2008 at 4:53 pm
Hotmail is particularly bad when it comes to their audio captcha. I tried to create an account to test the Live.com email service but couldn’t. THe audio is terrible!
August 18th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Yes, many audio captchas are not up to the required standard. BTW did you had a look at webvisum, plugin for firefox? According to it, it can solve captchas. I have not yet tryed it, having some problem downloading it. Check it out at
http://www.webvisum.com
Nirandas
August 18th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
Well, I wanted to try it but I don’t usually install mods unless they’re listed at the Mozilla Extensions site (for security).
I searched for this add-on and didn’t locate it.
August 18th, 2008 at 8:18 pm
I also wanted to try it, but for no reason, is not getting the download link on the download page. really strange. Also many blind people are trying this extension, don’t think there is a need to worry on security with this extension.
Put my Disclaimer here!