Please remove the eyetest from registration

When registering, I asked someone else to complete the 'distorted letters' eye test for me because I failed the first time. Please stop discriminating against people with poor eyesight: we don't need to see perfectly to use a phone. W3C has been advising against these bugs for years. See http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/

Please can the eyetest go away?

I'm afraid it's here to stay. It's one of a whole load of measures we had to put in place to prevent automated signups.

A necessary evil of the modern web. I don't really like them either for usability reasons.

The good news is now it's done you won't encounter another one here again.

Why won't voipuser use one of the W3-suggested alternatives?

Audio is an option.

Is there anything available which generates an audio file from a string?

It needs to be free, or at least within the VoIP User budget (i.e. dirt cheap).

Often these things are a bit of a balance. If we have 1 in 1,000 users that have a problem with the captcha and need help, I'll live with that. It's impossible to cater for absolutely everybody.

In principle I agree with you, I'm all for accessible websites. But sometimes practicalities and finances get in the way of creating perfection.

Hi.

I think what is important to note the W3C conclusion. Having read the report on audio that yahoo did, it seems it was worse than using CAPTCHA. We do ask for it only once, The W3C article is mainly aimed at using it for security signins, and in this case I agree, But as a one off to prevent fraud I think its reasonable.

Quote:

Sites with attractive resources and millions of users will always have a need for access control systems that limit widespread abuse. At that level, it is reasonable to employ many concurrent approaches, including audio and visual CAPTCHA, to do so. However, it must be noted that human users will fall through the cracks in these systems, and it will be necessary for sites like these to ensure that users with disabilities will have some human-operated means of interacting with a given resource in a reasonable amount of time.

Ian

dean :

Is there anything available which generates an audio file from a string?

I can think of three options, but I've not looked at this recently: rsynth, festival or using sox to paste together clips (which would also let one put background noise under it and so on, but that has its own problems).

Quote:

Often these things are a bit of a balance. If we have 1 in 1,000 users that have a problem with the captcha and need help, I'll live with that. It's impossible to cater for absolutely everybody.

It's possible to cater for this one and please let's not go the "it's cheaper to ignore the disabled"/"survival of the fittest" way, OK?

Reading the clip ianplain posted, an "email this admin" link might be good enough and far simpler/cheaper, but I don't remember seeing one of those at signup.

Quote:

"it's cheaper to ignore the disabled"/"survival of the fittest"

That's not fair. I'm not disagreeing with you in principle - in fact, I'm all for it and I dislike captcha for the same reasons.

I'm very happy to discuss it and try to build a solution around it but it needs to be cost effective otherwise it's not possible. That's what I meant by "impossible to cater for everybody". We do have financial limitations, unfortunately. We can't justify spending hundreds of dollars fixing something that affects 1 user in 1,000 when we have issues that need fixing that affect 100 users in 1,000.

We're also not in a position of having hours and hours of spare and available time.

Quote:

an "email this admin" link might be good enough

We can certainly do that - I'll put it in as soon as I get a minute if that will help.

Quote:

rsynth, festival or using sox

Is there anything out there that's ready-made, open-source or otherwise very affordable? Time restraints mean I probably won't be able to design and build something from scratch.

Dean