dinghies Re: Captcha and inaccessiblity

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003, Tom Croucher wrote:

>
>On Sun, 19 Oct 2003 15:06:34 -0400, Marja-Riitta Koivunen <marja@w3.org>
>wrote:
>
><snip>
>
>>>> might be like those IQ tests "A dingy is to ship as a go-cart is to
>>>> a?". The acceptable answers being "Car", "Bus", "Lorry" etc.
>>
>> I did not know what a dingy is :-).
>> We don't want to filter non-native English speakers and users with
>> cognitive disabilities either.
>>
>
>Surely that would be a translation issue. FYI a dingy is a small rubber
>raft.

Well yes, but given that Marja works at MIT for W3C, in english, it does
demonstrate the problem. And I always think of sailing dinghies - essentially
a small sailing boat without a fixed keel, almost never made of rubber. And
this for a word that I believe was in my illustrated dictionary in primary
school (along with jumper, which I know doesn't mean a pullover in the US,
but does in Australia).

I realise that we could link a dictionary, and with a PhD as a usability
engineer I expect Marja just looked it up. But the devil of this problem is
in the details, and there turn out to be a lot of them :(

cheers

Chaals