In order to keep their forms from being spammed by submit bots, many websites require users to read some text off an image that is distorted enough to make it unreadable to mechanical OCR programs. Unfortunately, this can also make it unreadable to humans. What if instead of asking for the user to attempt to read some text, we show them an image and ask them to verify it’s contents. For instance: show the user a distinctive photo of Brittany Spears , give them a list with possible answers and ask them to pick. Or to make it more secure and a 1-in-5 guess, ask them to type in the Last name of the celebrity shown. We could define a range of acceptable answers:

• Spears
• Speers
• Speres

This method requires a bit of cultural knowledge, so it is not ideal for large multi-national solutions, but for targeted audiences, could serve to enhance the experience on a site.