User talk:Fastfinge

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[edit] CAPTCHA

I've started a discussion about this problem (CAPTCHA with screen readers) which you may be interested in at MediaWiki talk:Captchahelp-text GDonato (talk) 17:09, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Autconfirmation

As the name would suggest it is automatic and happens after the account is 4 days old. It allows you to:

  • Edit pages despite semi-protection
  • Move pages to new titles

The wait is to prevent people creating throw-accounts solely for this purpose. GDonato (talk) 18:12, 11 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] More info on captchas

I'm one of the blind administrators WJBScribe referred to in his message at User talk:Jimbo Wales. I've talk a bit about accessibility here ... I complained when the Main Page was broken in March 2006, did some work at Wikipedia:Accessibility and I respond to accessibility questions when I'm asked to. I'm not generally vocal about things and the captcha wasn't a huge problem for me ... I could always get sighted assistance to help me to get through it.

Captchas were introduced for account creation in late February 2007. I was on a wikibreak at the time and didn't learn about it until I came back. Captchas were introduced after a failed attempt at logging on because of a series of admin account highjackings. These captchas disappear if you load another browser to log in, wait a little while, or even hard refresh the page. I can't remember when capptchas were required for non-autoconfirmed users to add external links, but it was either late 2006 or early 2007.

Captchas are often required for anonymous or non-autoconfirmed users, for things like adding external links and editing at a fast speed, as I discovered during my crazy tests with another account I have, Pianoman87. Captchas are never required for auto-confirmed users, as it says cryptically at Special:ListGroupRights. Note that an autoconfirmed user must now have at least 10 edits.

Some Wikimedia projects are stricter about captchas than others. The Portuguese Wikipedia requires a captcha for any edit at all until you're autoconfirmed, as I found when trying to add an interlanguage link. at least unified login helps somewhat with creating accounts, and means a captcha isn't needed to create an account on every project.

The last time I got someone to read me the captchas on Wikipedia, they were two words put together like "TopCat" or "CupDog". Therefore it might be easier if a free speech synthesizer like Festival or eSpeak was used to read out the captchas. Whatever speech system is used, the audio files must be slightly distorted as captchas for sighted people are quite distorted.

I hope some of this helps. I find that it usually takes six months for even an easy bug to be fixed in MediaWiki like the accessibility bug I filed about the admin interface. Maybe with Jimvo's intervension the captcha issue will be resolved sooner than that. Graham87 14:57, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Yes, I take your point about using wave files instead of speech synthesizers ... it'd be much easier to work with them. Also with the use of words in captchas, I was thinking that they'd be both said and spelt out, something like the spelling bee. However the last time I checked, the Wikipedia captcha uses English words even in non-English languages. Blind people are genrally bad spellers. Most people are attrocious spellers in a language they don't know well. For that reason, it might be a good idea to have a different captcha for audio with just random letters and numbers.
I was also thinking that native speakers of languages other than English would be needed to record the letters and numbers for the captchas on non-English sites. If needed, these could be recruited from the different language versions of WikiProject Spoken Wikipedia. Graham87 00:44, 11 June 2008 (UTC)
Re: Text captchas, MediaWiki has an option for captchas that are a graphic with a simple arithmetic problem like 34+1. The arithmetic problem is in the image caption so it's readable with screen readers. I remember encountering this several years ago when creating accounts on smaller Wikimedia Foundation projects, but there must be a good reason why it's disabled on WMF wikis. There aren't any other tasks I can think of which would be difficult for spambots but easy for humans to do, besides not creating spam.  :-) Graham87 01:06, 11 June 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Your recent edits

Hi there. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. If you can't type the tilde character, you should click on the signature button Image:Signature_icon.png located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your name and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you! --SineBot (talk) 01:46, 11 June 2008 (UTC)