Voice / Audio Captcha for Visually Disabled Users
April 17th, 2006Today while I was trying to create a Google Account, I saw a new symbol beside the word verification captcha form.
Look out for this icon 
If you hover the mouse over the icon, it says “Listed and type the numbers you hear“. And clicking on the icon, a voice clearly speaks out the voice captcha.
Captcha (an acronym for “completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart”) is a type of challenge-response test used in computing to determine whether or not the user is human. It requires the user to type the letters of a distorted and/or obscured sequence of letters or digits that appears on the screen and prevent prevent bots from using various types of computing services like taking part in online polls, registering for free email accounts etc.
But Captchas based on reading text or other visual-perception tasks prevent visually impaired users from using these service. This Google’s step to provide a voice captcha / audio captcha provides accesibility to websites and will lead to all captcha developers incorporating such features in their services.
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I should have thought of that before! It’s hard to find good captcha tools – many are just plain ugly and probable scare most would-be commenters away. But for visually impaired users, I imagine that no audio is an even bigger turn-off.