Text only captcha or non-embedded audio?

November 8, 2007 4:44 PM

With my last lynx cookie crumbs, I ask of thee...are there any text-browser compatible captchas?

ReCaptcha sounds all nice for those with modern equipment for surfing, but if you're like me, and stuck on a shell terminal for most of your websurfing, you seem to be out of luck. None of the captchas I've seen let you in unless you can display graphics, or hear sound from an embedded applet. I freely admit, off the top of my head, I can't think of a effective text-only method, but if the audio-captcha was at least a visible link that I could copy/paste into a media player....
So, am I dreaming? Has anyone gone to the effort of coming up with a more universal captcha?

posted by nomisxid to Computers & Internet (11 answers total)

ASCII-art? :)
posted by Mwongozi at 4:50 PM on November 8, 2007

It could be possible to render the CAPTCHA image as ASCII art using something simple like gif2ascii, for those text-only browsers. Of course, that's such a small percentage of the browsing population, it's unlikely to be widely adopted.

You could always "view source" and pluck out the appropriate URL to the audio CAPTCHA.
posted by dossy at 4:54 PM on November 8, 2007

Best answer: Do some googling for "Accessible Captcha." I've seen several text-based captchas that require natural language processing to break. Things like "To prove you're not a robot, please delete the second word in this sentence.' or "What color is [the White House / an orange / a red onion]?"

Or a Captcha that doesn't change, a la Jeff Atwood's blog.
posted by SemiSophos at 5:13 PM on November 8, 2007

My bank has an audio captcha that's just a link to a .wav file.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 5:21 PM on November 8, 2007

I was going to suggest the question-based idea that SemiSophos mentioned.
posted by robcorr at 5:21 PM on November 8, 2007

If it helps, I think nomisxid is probably specifically interested in browsers that would be compatible with the changes that have been made here at Metafilter, though I won't presume to speak for him.
posted by quin at 5:29 PM on November 8, 2007

whoops, I just reread the question and he is specifically looking for the captchas themselves. Nevermind.
posted by quin at 5:31 PM on November 8, 2007

I saw one, somewhere, that was for commenting on a blog. There was a set of radio buttons, each corresponding to a complete sentence. The test was to choose sentences that appeared in the text of the post.
posted by ijoshua at 5:45 PM on November 8, 2007

Response by poster: quin, I was inspired by the changes, but mefi is hardly the only anti-text captcha, so I got to wondering.
dossy, that usually doesn't work, because the URL is part of an embedded java applet, which doesn't expose an URL in the HTML at all.
posted by nomisxid at 5:50 PM on November 8, 2007

I don't know what it is called, but one capcha I've seen asks you to type in the sum of two numbers, which are usually given as a mix of digits and words e.g. "what is 6teen + twenty7?"

What's nice is that they can be read in text, and answered with text.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 6:31 PM on November 8, 2007

One site I use asks simple math questions in sentence form. Like "If I had 3 squirrels found 1 more how many do I have now?" or "I had 8 bananas and I sold 2. How many do I have left?" You can also register to bypass any questions when commenting. I think I've seen exactly one spam message after the implementation of the system. And it was along the lines of "Hah, I can still spam you." But they gave up because it wasn't worth the effort. The first questions were all vegetables but now have been expanded to fruits and animals (people were complaining about the limited selection, I guess).
posted by 6550 at 12:56 AM on November 9, 2007