TechNayak(mirror)

I agree that a computer without an internet connection is passe’ , but have we ever thought of the people deprived of the five basic senses. Im talking about the blind, deaf, disabled people and their accessability of computers. Thankfully many companies are investing dollars to help better their experience with the computer. Google’s T V Raman , a visually disabled engineer, who has been striving to develop better usability of computers for the blind has just conjured up another innovation. This time around its Audio Captcha’s.

Captcha, is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, a method based on the Turing Test to differentiate a Person from a bot. These are the blurred letters that usually preceede a submit button , that you have to enter to prove that you are not a bot simulating signup. Google has just developed an Audio Captcha mechanism in which the captcha is a simple series of words or numbers narrated by the computer, which the user has to enter after completion of the audio. To prevent bots from imitating this, as its not hard to find speech to text convertors, a little amount of distortion will be applied to the audio piece.

I sincerely appreciate the efforts by Google to help make the web a better place. Its a satiating feelign knowing that, when people are busy developing richer and stylish UI, there is still some innovation in the area for the underprivelleged. Kudos Google and TV Raman !!