ReCaptcha!

ReCaptcha is a verification tool that is gaining a lot of popularity on the internet as the leading tool to reduce unwanted eMail Spam from electronic forms. Any of you that host any type of form on your own site will be familiar with the sort of emails you can soon be bombarded by, sent by robots crawling the web looking to send out their unwanted blurb.

Simply put, ReCaptcha identifies whether you are a human being or not! If so, it will allow your form to be sent. This eliminates any robot-spam getting through, which means genuine form results can be dealt with much more speedily, whilst also speeding up the internet for all of us!

ReCaptcha does this by asking you to confirm a small piece of information that you would only be able to do if you were a real person. The main way it does this, is to ask you to enter some text you see in a small image. This text is not editable or selectable & is in effect,  a ‘photo’ of the word. A robot cannot read it as text, nor can character recognising software make any sense of it. The only way is to have a pair of eyes reading it!

Where ReCaptcha leads the way, and for which reason we have chosen it for the wavedreamer site, is that is also offers audio verification, for visitors with impaired vision. This allows for a fully accessible site, to all visitors. (For more info on other ways we have worked to make the wavedreamer site fully accessible, visit our accessibility page).

The following info is taken direct from ReCaptcha and offers some extra help on using ReCaptcha verification:

Instructions

• Please enter the words you see in the box, in order and separated by a space. Doing so helps prevent automated programs from abusing this service.
• If you are not sure what the words are, either enter your best guess or click the reload button next to the distorted words.
• Visually impaired users can click the audio button to hear a set of digits that can be entered instead of the visual challenge.

Helping the World One Word at a Time

By entering the words in the box, you are also helping to digitize texts that were written before the computer age. The words that you see were taken directly from old texts that are being scanned and stored in digital format in order to preserve them and make them more accessible to the world. Since some of the words in these texts are difficult for computers to process, we are using the results of your efforts to help decipher them.