By Carrie Wells, The Baltimore Sun
April 27, 2014
While blind people can browse the Internet through a variety of
means, there is often one thing that stops them cold - a security
feature known as a CAPTCHA that's designed to distinguish human
users from robots.
CAPTCHAs, in which a user must identify the letters in a
distorted image, are commonly used to block automated bots from
grabbing up all the tickets for an event, signing up for
thousands of email addresses in a short period of time or
unfairly swaying the results of an online poll. They have drawn
criticism from advocacy organizations for the blind for being too
difficult to use, but last month, Towson University secured a
U.S. patent for a new kind of CAPTCHA that's intended to be
easier for those with limited or no eyesight.
With Towson's SoundsRight CAPTCHA, users listen to a series of
10 random sounds and are asked to press the computer's space bar
each time they hear a certain noise - a dog barking, a horse
neighing - among the other sounds. The developers say it is
superior to Google's current audio alternative CAPTCHA, citing
studies showing that version's failure rate of 50 percent for
blind users.
"Blind people are capable of doing everything that a visual
person can on the Internet," said Jonathan Lazar, a Towson
professor who has led a group of graduate and outside researchers
on the project. "We just try to come up with some equivalent
features that make it easier."
"Some people are unaware that blind people can use the
Internet," Lazar added.
The SoundsRight CAPTCHA is still in a "beta" version, Lazar
said, and the developers are hoping a real-world rollout will
help identify any necessary tweaks.
The Towson researchers worked closely on testing with the
National Federation of the Blind, which is headquartered in the
Riverside neighborhood of Baltimore. Anne Taylor, the
federation's director of access technology, said there are
several types of software available for blind users to read the
text on a Web page aloud. Taylor, who is blind, said not being
able to use visual CAPTCHAs could impede a blind person's ability
to enjoy the benefits of the Internet and hurt their ability to
hold a job.
A sighted person could help a blind user with the visual
CAPTCHAs, she said, but the blind want to be independent on the
Internet. Further, since many CAPTCHAs are on web pages that ask
for personal financial information, she has concerns about
privacy.
"The Internet is such an important and integral part of our
daily lives now," Taylor said. "Just think of how many hours you
spend on the web as a sighted individual. Would you really want
to have someone with you all that time?"
CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing
test to tell Computers and Humans Apart, was introduced as a
concept by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950. The term was
coined in 2000 by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University who
developed an early Web page test program for Yahoo.
The CAPTCHAs protect from automated hacking programs that can
also leave spam comments on blogs, attack protected passwords and
send junk email.
Tim Brooks, the chief software developer on the SoundsRight
project since 2010, said the audio CAPTCHA can be embedded into
any Web page and customized by the webmaster. Brooks said its
script could be tweaked to be used in any number of different
languages or have users identify any number of sounds. An
organization for train enthusiasts, he said, could potentially
have users identify the sounds of different types of trains.
The SoundsRight CAPTCHA is just as secure as the traditional
visual CAPTCHAs, he said. Sighted users can use the audio
CAPTCHA as well, or a Web page could give the option of either a
visual CAPTCHA or the SoundsRight CAPTCHA, he said. The only
potential downside to the technology is that it takes about 30 to
40 seconds to complete, versus less than 10 seconds for a visual
CAPTCHA, Brooks said.
"A lot of people don't have that kind of patience," he said.
The Towson CAPTCHA project was the brainchild of
then-undergraduate student Jon Holman in 2007 as a class project,
Lazar said. In a 2007 focus group, blind users identified visual
CAPTCHAs as the biggest impediment to their using the Internet
independently. Several other students, faculty members and
outside researchers have assisted in developing the technology
since the project began.
"We've always done the evaluation with blind users at every
step," Lazar said. "This was research that was done because
blind users were telling us this was important."
The project was partially supported with a $50,000 grant from
the Maryland Technology Development Corp., Lazar said. The
researchers went through several different prototypes, rejecting
those that weren't found to be secure enough.
The SoundsRight CAPTCHA is in use on the National Federation of
the Blind's website, and the organization is working to encourage
various groups and businesses to adopt it.
"We are all one step away from a sudden disability, so why not
make the Internet an inclusive place for everybody?" Taylor said.
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