I think my eyesight is okay. I know I’m a bit colourblind, but other than that and a lack of perspective, it’s okay.
These captchas, seen on the Oz-Astra web site forums though, these are too much. I know you have to fight spammers, but there comes a point where real humans are going to be defeated too, and eventually give up in frustration. Thankfully you can refresh the image and hope for something a bit more readable, but why not bring the difficulty level down from eleven so it’s not so hard?
(I’m not trying to single this site out; there are others that also frustrate. And I suspect this is down to an over-zealous implementation in vBulletin.)
Don’t worry, there will be some OCR bot out there somewhere that can. 😉
Of course, even if OCR were impossible, I’m pretty sure there are spammers out there somewhere using armies of cheap labour to type in the letters/numbers. A process that is easily automated by grabbing the image, sending it off to an operator and getting them to type in the characters, then returning the value back to the web bot. Imagine how many a single person could do in an hour. So maybe they are actually trying to make the average person take longer to get it right. 😉