John,
The phone number idea is good as long as one can make a local call. It is
sort of similar to product activation; having said that what is to prevent
a very clever program from making that call and getting the requisite data?
I was thinking of a smart voice phone system.
Can you tell I have been reading too much science fiction? <grin
Pranav
At 08:58 PM 7/24/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>I have also tried to use the spoken letters from Microsoft for another
>purpose - signing up for a "passport". I gave up after the first
>trial. The reason that this problem arises is to keep spammers from
>jamming everybody's account with junk mail, so we all have to sympathize
>with the problem that is being solved here. The background noise is
>deliberate, because it would defeat the purpose if the spoken message was
>so clear that speech recognition could pick it up and translate it correctly.
>
>I was in a Microsoft-hosted meeting with a lot of access technologists
>recently, and Microsoft was looking to us for a better solution. This
>group of "experts" couldn't come up with any idea better than having a
>phone number to call. There must be some clever way that blind people can
>be given enough information to sign up, but that's easier to say than to
>do. If anybody on the list does have a really good solution, I'll forward
>it to Microsoft. And I'll all but guarantee that they'll adopt it if it
>really does solve the problem for blind people without permitting a
>computer program to access it automatically and flood Hotmail with zillions
>of spam-generating accounts. Given a choice, I'll take the minor bother of
>calling a phone number in preference to multiplying the spam that floods my
>e-mail.
>
>John
>
>
>At 10:20 PM 7/24/2003 -0400, you wrote:
>>Hello
>>
>>While attempting to set up a Hotmail account, I got to a point where you
>>need to type in characters that appear in a picture. What is nice is that
>>they have an option for you to click on a link if you can't see the
>>picture. The idea is that you click on a wav file which contains the
>>spoken characters that you need to type in. In theory that is great, but
>>in practice, listening to the file is an exercise in frustration, as there
>>is so much background noise, that you can't distinguish, for example a "b"
>>from a "p." Moreover, the speed at which the woman read-out the
>>characters made it necessary to replay the file more than once. I tried
>>at least ten times with no luck. Every
>>time I typed in what I thought I heard as the character string, it was
>>wrong.
>>Has anyone else experienced this new kink in Hotmail?
>>
>>While MicroSoft should be applauded for taking a different approach than
>>Yahoo (where you need to call in to get the characters that are embedded
>>in a picture), was
>>this fully tested for its practicality?
>>
>>Jennison
>>
>>-----------------------
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>
>John Gardner
>Professor and Director, Science Access Project
>Department of Physics
>Oregon State University
>Corvallis, OR 97331-6507
>tel: (541) 737 3278
>FAX: (541) 737 1683
>e-mail: [log in to unmask]
>URL: http://dots.physics.orst.edu
>
>-----------------------
>Check out the EASI web:
>http://www.rit.edu/~easi
>Check EASI Courses and Clinics
>To sign off this list
>send e-mail to [log in to unmask] saying
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>
-----------------------
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http://www.rit.edu/~easi
Check EASI Courses and Clinics
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