I am visually impaired and can attest to both visual captchas being a pain and audio captchas being hard to understand. this change is nothing but an improvement as far as accessibility and usability goes. This is only a plus for people who implement these, as I have actually left sites that had insurmountable captchas for me.
"WebVisum is a unique browser add on which greatly enhances web accessibility and empowers the blind and visually impaired community by putting the control in your hands!"
"Automated and instant CAPTCHA image solving, sign up to web sites and make forum posts and blog comments without asking for help!"
I was curious about the CAPTCHA solving, too, so I tested WebVivum out on ~8 reCAPTCHAs.[1] It solved all except 2 of them, taking 20-60 seconds each time. In 2 cases it reported failing to solve the CAPTCHA, but it never gave an incorrect result. That is, whenever it gave a solution the solution was correct (in my brief test).
So, while it's some way off their claim of "instant" CAPTCHA solving, this is definitely a very useful addon, especially for those people who cannot solve CAPTCHAs at all. Thank you for pointing it out.
There are ways to solve captchas somewhat reliably programatically. I suspect this plugin only works on certain computer generated captchas, not the street sign ones.
Very helpful, thank you! I have a difficult OCR problem to solve, rather than identity. Interesting to see that the market price for "being human" is $0.00139.
The fact that this works shows that distorted-text captchas are no longer effective.
From the Google's blog post:
> our research recently showed that today’s Artificial Intelligence technology can solve even the most difficult variant of distorted text at 99.8% accuracy
Thank you.