Only You Can Help Advance Digital Literacy, or Nerding Out on reCAPTCHA

You'll come to like these forms. 

When you submit information in an online form, you're often prompted to fill out a box like the one above.

These help Web sites deter spam, because the slightly oblique words can only be read by a human. Good for Web sites, but pretty annoying – in fact, users spend 150,000 hours a day entering security words.

Luckily, someone found a way to make use of those hours. Soon, many anti-spam query boxes will be replaced with a tool called reCAPTCHA .

Instead of just entering random words, when users are prompted with a reCAPTCHA box, they will actually be helping to clarify words from scanned documents, which certain literacy projects are using to put books, magazines and other documents online. The software that scans physical documents, not surprisingly, can't interpret all words correctly, so it needs a pair of human eyes to decipher certain words.

When you are prompted with two words, one of those words is known by reCAPTCHA, but the other word is from that big list of indecipherable words. By entering the known word correctly, users help the scanning system determine the correct reading of the other word.

So take heart - every time you post information online with reCAPTCHA, you're helping to advance and preserve literacy. 

Thanks to kukkuzejt on reddit for the story.