On 28/07/12 16:55, Everton Zanella Alvarenga wrote: > In the conclusion: > > "Contrary to the common belief, text-based CAPTCHAs can be difficult > for foreigners." > > It is worth reading and likely the same for references there in. The > first sentence is similar to what I have experience in 3 classes. And > people begin to get anxious and usually say "If I type wrongly again, > I'll give up". I've seen 3 students saying this to me. > > Even if hypothetically had in an experiment that only 1% of foreigners > will face difficulties with CAPTCHA in a foreign language (I bet it's > much more from real life experience), how much users this would > represent in one of the most accessed sites in the world? > > Tom
There are two types of "foreigners" here: - One are speakers of another language written in latin1 (such as Brazilians). - Another are those who use a diferent writing script, such as Russians or Greeks. In the first case, they should have little problem. Native speakers of the language used for the wordlist have an extra help, because they are more likely to recognise the words and it can also help them perform error recovery. It would be nice to provide a captcha with a native wordlist, but by limiting to ascii characters, it can get pretty universal. Distortion where a letter looks like a different one is still problematic. Even people with English knowledge can have trouble with it, so being a native speaker doesn't magically make you invulnerable to captcha errors. On 16th July of 2007 Arnomane reported a case where "o" distortion made it look like an "a", on August I reported another where an "s" looked like a "g". I expect that using random characters would make it worse, though. People with other scripts are a different matter. * They may not be able to recognise the latin characters. * You may be forcing them to change the language layouts for solving the captcha. * Foreign visitors may not be able to pass your captcha. ** Lack of appropiate keyboard layout. ** Unable to differenciate the characters (you want me to differenciate ت and ث distorted in a noisy background?) ** No fonts installed for viewing the characters (eg. 𓀝 vs 𓀞) such as if you were trying to browse the in character map the script characters of the language (potentially hundreds!) looking for a visual match. Yet, there are reports such as this by Liangent (native Chinese speaker) on this list on 5th February 2011: > I hate the case that I'm asked with a Chinese captcha when I'm surfing > some Chinese websites without IME available. > > Besides I don't prefer Chinese captchas personally because Chinese > characters usually require more key hits. At least for those languages I think we would need a switch to get a captcha in the different "language". We should also add the "button to get a new captcha" (bug 14230), which should help when you get the wrong captcha. And I think we should also add a "Problems solving the captcha? Mail us" link for those cases when people can't pass the captcha. Not that it would solve their problems, but it would at least provide a way to lighten their frustration. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
