Re: 'Anti Robot' Registrations

Or at least offer this as a choice and there is one other technique that
could be used and that is a simple question that could be rotated for each
hit.  hundreds of these questions are available, such as where does the sun
rise or set, how long is a day?  how may days in a year, month, week, leap
yar, how many weeks ina month, year...

This was not my idea but I ad it here for the  sake of completness.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthew Smith" <matt@kbc.net.au>
To: "WAI Interest Group" <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Sent: Saturday, January 24, 2004 6:33 PM
Subject: 'Anti Robot' Registrations



Greetings All

I have seen on this list, on more than one occassion, discussions about the
technique used by Yahoo and others to prevent 'robot' registrations by
presenting a graphic of a word or number that has to be keyed into a form.

As there is no appropriate alt text to these images (which would defeat the
point, making them machine-readable), this obviously constitues an
accessibility
problem.

This may have been done before, but what I propose for such an application
is this:

A sentence is selected at random, say from a book (Project Gutenberg text?)
or a
series of random words.

An input field with the message "please select the fifth word from the
following
sentence" is displayed, followed by the sentence/words.  It would probably
be
useful to put an anchor by the input field so that the user could skip back
to
it easily once they had read the sentence/words.

I can see that a 'robot' could be programmed to recognise ordinals, but by
varying the text, it would make it harder for 'robot' programmers to make
sense
of what is being asked.

Comments?

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy
South Australia
http://www.kbc.net.au

Received on Saturday, 24 January 2004 18:40:36 UTC