I have a cognitive processing condition. I call it “dyscaptia”. Those CAPTCHAs, little photos of twisted texts that are on various sites that are designed to confuse computers, confuse me.

And I don’t mean that they take me a moment to figure out. I can not read them at all. I was off of Facebook for months because the password recovery process requires one of these things.

If your site requires one of these to use your product, or send a message… you will never hear from me. I have dyscaptia.

Oh! You have “alternate methods”, you say!!! One can just listen to the garbled audio version, you say!! Turns out no. I can’t. Well, I can listen, but I do not comprehend.

If they would have said you can either write a paper on symbolism in One Hundred Years of Solitude – or you can type in this CAPTCHA… it is at least possible for me to write that paper.

My work-around for CAPTCHA involves me getting on video chat with someone who will tell me what the hell the thing says.

It is mildly amazing to me, actually. There can be 5 people on the video chat – all of whom give me the same answer. And even when I KNOW the answer, I still can’t figure out how they got there.

So, either that Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart is wrong, or I am not human.

UPDATE

Got a great note from Maartin…

The possible solution to your problem: Rumola
If you use google chrome, I suggest you do, you can install this web addon called Rumola, with that you can bypass the captcha’s, it solves them for you, of course it probaly won’t work ALL the time, but it’s probably better than calling 5 other people on skype or something like that.

Here’s a link: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/rumola-bypass-captcha/bjjgbdlbgjeoankjijbmheneoekbghcg

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Thanks!