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    <p>The introduction of CAPTCHA has certainly made the web less accessible to the visually impaired, and I agree with you in citing this as a significant problem that deserves more attention and concern. However, while CAPTCHA can be and has been inconsistently bypassed on popular web sites, I don't think this is a viable long-term solution for those in need. Indeed, the day that the CAPTCHA variants currently present on sites like Facebook, Google, MySpace etc. can be reliably and consistently broken is the day they will become obsolete and abandoned for either stronger variants of the same or an entirely new solution (as you implied, distinguishing cats from dogs in pictures has been a popular alternative trend). </p> <p>When it comes to online accessibility, what I think those with disabilities need most right now is advocacy. The more people contact software companies, open source groups, and standards bodies and speak out about this need, the more awareness will be raised and that will (hopefully) lead to more action on behalf of the development community. Ultimately, it would be great to see sites like Google or Facebook offering alternative access methods just for their visually impaired users. </p> <p>Idealism aside, I think it is productive to pursue other avenues like you mentioned with the CAPTCHA volunteer network, possibly even the development of something like OpenID for those with relevant disabilities as a universal form validation pass. </p> <p>As for the technical aspect of your question, I don't think the availability of additional processing power alone will allow you to reliably and consistently break CAPTCHA. There is A LOT of money in spam, and you can be sure that shady SEO companies and Spammers alike have a great number of servers at their disposal. As Johannes Rössel mentioned, if you want to learn more about how this is done and where the technical difficulty lies, research Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and look at the wide variety of number/letter skewing that occurs on high traffic sites. </p>
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    1. POBreaking CAPTCHAs for a Noble Purpose
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    1. COThanks Mark. The difference between this situation and that of a spammer or shady SEO person is that they have to break the CAPTCHA many times in a very short period, whereas a blind person (or a service working on their behalf) has a much lower volume and speed requirement. So if there were a relatively expensive algorithm (where expense is measured in time or CPUs or both) for solving a particular type of CAPTCHA, that wouldn't necessarily mean that big sites would abandon that type of CAPTCHA, nor could we necessarily conclude that shady users would already be using it.
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      1. USDouglas Squirrel
    2. COI understand and agree with your logic on that, but my point above was that CPU power isn't the issue. The issue is OCR character recognition, which currently isn't advanced enough to accurately and consistently identify the more complex CAPTCHA variants. Unless OCR is robust enough to automatically identify purposely misconstrued characters the way the human brain is able to, the only alternative is to take educated guesses at brute forcing a solution, which in my belief is likely to fail not because of available CPU power but because of other network related issues/constraints.
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    3. COHave you considered other methods of providing access for visually impaired users that involve working with service providers to bypass, rather than defeat, CAPTCHA?
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