10 June 2007 ~ 3 Comments

Usability suggestion for captcha programmers

Here’s something that I implement in passwords, verification emails and if I programmed captcha I would without fail do. Remove all ambiguous characters from the captchas you generate. It is ridiculously simple to do. Less than 30 seconds editing of an array and it will save hundreds of mistyped/misinterpreted verifications and user frustration.  For example under some fonts the letter O and the number 0 look the same.

Characters to exclude are the letters o, b, z, q, g, s, i and the numbers to exclude are 0, 1, 2, 5

Yes, you can use these characters if they look sufficiently different in the font, but sometimes down the line you might change the font forgetting the consequences.

3 Responses to “Usability suggestion for captcha programmers”

  1. Dina Fanai 20 June 2007 at 6:58 pm Permalink

    Pretty good!! I,m gonna use it!!

  2. Xuan Au 10 August 2007 at 11:32 pm Permalink

    Sometimes the simplest things can be overlooked.

    Been a while since i have been here. Another redesign?

  3. Ian Cheung 17 August 2007 at 12:26 pm Permalink

    Just grabbed a nice theme from WPDesigner.com. Not sure about the header but I love how text is handled by this theme. Clear and readable.


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