Dan Rumney wrote:
st*********@hot mail.com wrote:
A lot of websites have forms with an image at the bottom containing
some distorted / noisy letters and numbers that users must type in to
prove they are real people. How do they normally implement that? Is
there any free server-side code out there to generate those images?
--Steve
not really HTML, but do a web search for CAPTCHAs
Or, preferably, forget the idea. It is illegal in some situations,
namely on publicly funded sites on some civilized countries that have
accessibility legislation. It is a bad and discriminatory idea everywhere.
It's not just blind people that find themselves blocked out (or forced
to use a secondary entrance for secondary people) but also people with
reduced eyesight or difficulties in interpreting visual information. If
your native writing system does not use Latin letters, how easily will
you recognize handwritten Latin letters when they are strongly styled
(as they often are, to prevent programs from recognizing them)? Assuming
your native language uses Latin letters and you know how to read
Cyrillic letters when printed, would you recognize handwritten Cyrillic
letters?
Thus, instead of making your assumed problem (or risk) a serious problem
to your users, find some other way. (And take this to a more suitable
group if you need help with it; it's not about HTML.) A tolerable
approach might be to ask, in text, a simple question in the language
used on the page and prompt for a simple answer. If the page is in
English, we can expect users to know how to answer a question like "how
much is two plus three?" with either "five" or "5". But you might end up
with asking questions that are trivial to you but not to all users, and
it would be an annoyance anyway.
