i went to gmail today to login to an older email account i haven’t checked in a while… apparently *too* long, because i got presented a captcha upon entering the username and password.
i was having a hard time reading the text (no surprises there, captcha’s really suck as a technology), so for fun i decided to try clicking the “handicap” icon so i could listen to the captcha in audio format.
for some reason, it’s never occurred to me that, just as visual captcha uses random crap in the image to try to prevent OCR from determining the letters, the audio version would contain a whole lot of noise in an effort to prevent text to speech from doing the same.
if you’ve ever wondered what an audible version of the mass confusion that is a modern captcha file might sound like: here you go.
all i can say is, it’s a good thing i can see.