2007 IEEE International Symposium

on Signal Processing and Information Technology

CAPTCHA for Blind People

Mohammad Shirali-Shahrezal, Sajad Shirali-Shahreza2
Computer Science Department, Sharif University of Technology, Azadi Street, Tehran, IRAN
Email: shraligcs.sharifedu, Website: hp ohammad.shiralir
2
Computer Engineering Department, Sharif University of Technology, Azadi Street, Tehran, IRAN
Email: shirali&e.sharifiedu, Website: http://sajad.shira1iir

Abstract - Nowadays the Internet users are from different
ages and groups. The disabled people also use the Internet.
Some websites are especially created for disabled people.
Many Internet sites offers services for human users, but
unfortunately some computer programs are designed which
abuse these services. As a result some systems named
CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell
Computers and Human Apart) have been introduced to tell
apart human users and computer software. In this paper, a
new CAPTCHA method is introduced which can be used by
blindpeople. In this method a simple mathematicalproblem
is created according to predefined patterns and converted
to speech using a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system. Then the
sound is played for the user and helshe must enter the
answer of the question. Because answering this problem
requires recognizing the speech, understanding the
problem, and solving the problem, only a human user can
answer this question and present computer programs are
unable to solve it. In addition, answering the question is
easy for blind people, because the question is consists a
number of natural language sentences and the answer is a
number, which can be entered easily.
Keywords - Blind People, Completely Automated Public
Turing test to tell Computers and Human Apart
(CAPTCHA), Disabled People, Natural Language
Processing (NLP), Text-To-Speech (TTS).
1. INTRODUCTION
Today lots of daily activities such as education, shopping
and mailing are done through the Internet. By rapid growth
of the Internet and the easy access to it, a great deal of
private and personal information is available on the web.
On the other hands, nowadays the Internet in not only for
special groups of people, but also peoples from any age and
different groups are using the Internet. There are many
websites for children on the Internet and the children using
the Internet for various activities such as entertaining,
educating, etc. The elderly people communicate and chat
with their children and relative using the Internet. In
addition to regular peoples, the disabled peoples are also
using the Internet.
There are registration forms on many websites which
users should fill out them to be able to use website services.
Unfortunately some vandalistic persons write bot programs
which are filling out the registration forms with incorrect
information automatically. These attacks lead to interruption
in websites operations and websites cannot offer services to
the users.
Various methods are presented to overcome above
problem. The goal of these methods is distinguishing human
users from computer programs. These methods are done
automatically by computer programs since examination of a
large amount of registration forms by human forces needs a
great deal of time and expense.
CAPTCHA (Completely Automatic Public Turing Test
to Tell Computer and Human Apart) are systems which are
used to tell human and machine apart automatically. These
systems are based on Artificial Intelligence (Al) topics.
They are similar to Turing test, but they differ in that the
judge is a computer [1]. The goal of these systems is to ask
a questions which human users can easily answer, while
current computer programs cannot. CAPTCHA systems also
have other applications such as prevention from sending
spam [2].
CAPTCHA methods can be generally divided to two
groups:
1- OCR-based: Based on the weaknesses of Optical
Character Recognition Systems.
2- Non-OCR-Based: Mainly based on the weaknesses
of multimedia retrieval systems.
In OCR-based systems, image of a word is showed to the
user after distortion and with various visual effects and
he/she must type it. Considering existence of various visual
effects, computer programs will encounter problems in the
recognition of these words and only a human user can
recognize the concerned word. Examples of these methods
are: Persian/Arabic Baffle Text [3] and Gimpy [4]. But
these methods cause users' dissatisfaction. On the other

978-1 -4244-1 835-0/07/$25.00 2007 IEEE 995

hand some methods have been innovated to attack OCR-
based methods [5].
In contrast, there are Non-OCR-Based methods which
are more comfortable for users than OCR-based methods.
These methods mainly based on the features of multimedia
such as pictures and sounds and usually using methods like
small puzzle games. Examples of these methods are PIX [6]
and Collage CAPTCHA [7].
However, some of the Internet websites are especially
designed for disabled persons. Also these websites need
protection against computer programs which try to use
website resources. But common CAPTCHA systems are
usually difficult for disabled people. In next section, some
of the Non-OCR-Based methods which can be used by
disabled people are described.
The suggested method in this paper is a Non-OCR-based
CAPTCHA method which is designed for blind people. In
our suggested method, a simple mathematical problem is
created according to predefined patterns and converted to
speech using a Text-To-Speech (TTS) system. Then the
sound is played for the user and he/she must answer the
question. A computer requires the following abilities to
answer the question:
1- Recognition of the question using Speech
Recognition systems.
2- Understanding the meaning of the question.
3- Solving the problem and answering the question.
Since it is difficult for computer program to succeed in
doing any of these operations, only a human user can
answer the question. In section 3 we will explain this
method and its experimental results.
To answer in this way the only thing the user has to do is
to enter a number (which is the answer of the problem) and
we don't have to type long phrases. Answering the question
is easy for blind people, because the question is consists of
some natural language sentences and the answer is a
number, which can be entered easily.
In the final section, the conclusion will be made after
investigating and studying some advantages of this method.
2. RELATED WORKS
Here, we study and examine some Non-OCR-Based
CAPTCHA methods which can be used by disabled people.
A. Drawing CAPTCHA [8]
This method is for devices like PDA (Personal Digital
Assistant) which uses stylus. In this method, numerous dots
are drawn on a screen with noisy background and the user is
asked to connect certain dots to each other.
In view of the problems that computers face in
recognizing the dots from the noise, only a human user can
easily identify the special dots and connect them to each
other.
Unlike OCR-based CAPTCHA methods, the users of any
language in any age group can use this program and run it
on devices with limited resources.
B. Collage CAPTCHA [7]
This method is a CAPTCHA method which is developed
by authors. In this method, the images of some different
objects (for example six objects such as airplane, car, apple,
orange, pineapple and ball) are chosen. Then some effects
such as rotation are done on the images and they merged to
create a single image (Fig. 1). This image is shown to the
user and he/she is asked to click on a certain object (for
example on the image of the apple).
Like PIX [4], Collage CAPTCHA requires a database of
labeled images. Creating this database is expensive and
requires a lot of time. It is an easy CAPTCHA method for
users, because in this method the user must find the object
image which its name is shown. In addition, this method
may have high rate of random passing. If the images of
different objects can be easily become separated, and the
number of different objects is N, the probability of passing
the test with random answer can be 1/N.
Disabled people such as hearing or sight impaired
persons can use this method because it uses images without
any distortion. In addition, mobility impaired persons can
use this method easily because it requires only one click.
C. ASIRRA [10]
This method is developed by Microsoft Research with
the help of "Petfinder.com". ASIRRA is the abbreviation of
"Animal Species Image Recognition for Restricting
Access". In this method, a number of different images (for
example 12 images) of cats and dogs are shown to the user
and the user must select the images of cats.
Collage CAPTCHA
W mtteoby:
Mohamad Shirali-Shahreza
Sajad Shirali-Shahreza
Sel:ect the cat imrage.
Fig. 1. A sample of Collage CAPTCHA [9]
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 The random pass rate of this method is low. This method
is similar to Collage CAPTCHA [7], because the name of
the object (which is always "cat") is shown to the user.
This method has a large database (two million images),
which is created manually [10].
One of the problems of ASIRRA method is that
distinguishing between cats and dogs cannot be done easily
for all images. For example, deciding whether the Figure 2
is cat or dog is not easy. This image is selected from the
ASIRRA website [10].
Disabled people such as hearing or sight impaired
persons can use this method because it uses natural images
without any distortion.
3. OUR SUGGESTED METHOD
In this section, our suggested method has been described
and implementation of an example of it has been explained.
In this method, at first, on the basis of a series of pre-
designed patterns, a question is prepared. In these patterns,
some of the elements of the problem are variable and
changeable and they are chosen from some items randomly.
For example a pattern of the problem is as follows:
There are a1 numbers of b1, a2 numbers of b2 and a3
numbers of b3 on a table. How many c1s are there on the
table?
In this pattern, b, is name of the object, for example
apple, ball, pencil, cat, etc. and ai > 0 is the number of b,
objects. Each object belongs to a specific group which is
showed with cj. For example cat, dog, and mouse are among
pets which are showed for example with c2. Or pencil,
paper, and book are among stationery. As a result, if a
problem is made with this pattern it may be as follows:
"There are 5 cats, 3 apples, and 4 dogs on a table. How
many pets are there on the table?"
The answer is 7 (3 cats+4 dogs=7 pets).
Or it may be a problem like the following one:
"There are 2 pencils, 3 books, and 1 mouse on a table.
How many fruits are there on the table?"
Here the answer is 0 because there is no fruit on the
table.
222224~~~I&I
Fig. 2. A sample of images used in ASIR1RA [10]
As you see, the user has only to enter a number. We can
increase the diversity and variety of the questions by
designing different and various patterns and even make
them more difficult and more sophisticated, too.
Now the question is converted to an audio file. This is
done using a Text-To-Speech system. At last the question
audio file will be played for the user.
As we specified earlier, it is easy for human users to
answer these questions and the only thing they must do is to
enter a number. Consequently, little time is required to
answer and the user can answer these questions quickly.
But answering these questions is difficult for a computer
program because the computer requires at least three
abilities to answer these questions:
1- Computer must recognize phrase said through a
speech recognition system.
2- After recognition of sound, the computer should be
able to understand the meaning of the question.
3- At last and even if a computer does the two above-
mentioned stages successfully, it must be capable
to answer the question.
The percentage of success of computers is low in each of
the mentioned stages. As a result, if the user can answer the
question correctly, we can conclude that the user is a human
user.
To implement this project, at first we made some patterns
according to the structure which was previously mentioned.
Then a program was designed for making a sample question
based on these patterns. The program is written in Java
programming language.
At first this software chooses one of the patterns
randomly, and then it makes a choice from among the
existent and available choices for each of the variables and
puts them in the pattern.
After the question was made, it is converted to an audio
file. We use the FreeTTS. FreeTTS is a speech synthesis
system written entirely in the Java programming language.
It is based upon Flite, a small, fast, run-time speech
synthesis engine, which in turn is based upon University of
Edinburgh's Festival Speech Synthesis System and Carnegie
Mellon University's FestVox project [11].
Now the audio file is played for the user. If the user
enters the answer (which is a number) correctly, the
software will play a successful message and allows the user
carry out the concermed operations.
4. CONCLUSION
In this paper a new CAPTCHA method has been
~presented which is designed for blind people. In this method
a simple mathematical problem is created according to
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 Considering the computer's difficulty in recognition of
the question from audio, understanding of the problem, and
solving the problem, only a human user can answer the
question.
The question is said as a natural language phrase and
there is no need to read anything, so blind people can also
use this method easily. this method easily.
Unlike OCR-based CAPTCHA methods, this method
requires only typing of a number as the answer. Therefore it
is easy to use, saves user time and does not cause any
discomfort for users. Typing a number is not difficult for
blind people and is very easier than typing a series of
characters.
By using different TTS systems, this method
Byuingdiferem
m d can be
, ti
cn
localized for different languages. For example, the question
lcalbaizd
can be said in dFrentFh
for
French.
We can increase the degree of difficultness of this
method and as a result the degree of the resistance against
the attacks through changing pattern of questions. But doing
this will cause the program to be more difficult for human
users, too.
In this method it is not necessary to have a keyboard and
we have only to enter a number. Thereforewewe canonly
have
usetoetraubrTeeCAPTCHA,"
this
method on devices which don't have a keyboard or on
devices in which it is difficult to use a keyboard, such as
mobile phones and Pocket PCs. Furthermore we can use
them not only on web pages but also on computer programs
as well.
If we change question patterns we can put forth other
problems than mathematical problems. For example we can
design a medical question such as "How many bones are
there in a human's jaw?"
We can customize this method for special websites. For
example we can use medical questions like the above-
mentioned question for medical websites.
REFERENCES
[1] H.S. Baird and J.L. Bentley, "Implicit CAPTCHAs,"
Proceedings SPIEIIS&T Conference on Document Recognition and
Retrieval XII (DR&R2005), San Jose, 2005, pp. 191-196.
[2] N. M. Boers and P. Gburzynski, "An Automation of Mail
Channels," Proceeding of International Conference on Internet and Web
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Telecommunications (AICT-ICIW 06), Washington, DC, USA, February
2006, pp. 210.
[3] M.H. Shirali-Shahreza and M. Shirali-Shahreza, "Persian/Arabic
Baffletext CAPTCHA," Journal of Universal Computer Science (J. UCS),
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o112, December
eebr06p.18-76
2006, pp. 1783-1796.
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be
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[7] M.Proceedings
Shirali-Shahreza and S. Shirali-Shahreza, "Collage
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[8] M. Shirali-Shahreza and S. Shirali-Shahreza, "Drawing
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2006, pp. 475-480.
[9] M. Shirali-Shahreza and S. Shirali-Shahreza, Collage
CAPTCHA website, 2007, http://www.hipir/Co1lageCAPTCHA/.
[10] Microsoft, Asirra (Animal Species Image Recognition for
RestrictingAccess), 2007, http://research.microsoft.comasirra/.
[11] W. Walker, P. Kwok, and P. Lamere, FreeTTS Open Source
Speech Synthesis System, Speech Integration Group, March 2005,
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