CAPTCHA Isn’t Working
Here is an interesting fact: People spend 150,000 hours a day typing in CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart) codes. Some people don’t mind it, and say that the CAPTCHA instills trust in the site because it appears more secure. However, a lot of people are complaining, and with good reason. Some CAPTCHAs are incredibly difficult because they are trying to confuse OCR-capable bots, but they end up confusing humans too.
What can we do instead? Well, the solution(s) needs to be accessible to those hard of hearing or visually impaired. The W3C laid out some solutions back in 2005. The reCAPTCHA project is also working on it. They have digitized over 2 million unrecognizable (via OCR screen reading technology) words that are easier to read than the standard code (see the image below). Another way to go about it may be to have people watch a video and type in what they see. Images would not work (e.g. typing “dog” when you see a picture of a dog) because there are only a limited number of images that could be used (see Security Now episodes #101-102 for more).
I think the reCAPTCHA project along with auditory CAPTCHAs may be the best solution.
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