The caplock seemed to be on for data entry

Question

Last night my wife was in a textbox on a web page, trying to enter the captcha (?sp) word. It always made whatever she typed in upper case, which was very irritating. But only in that textbox. And when I brought up Notepad and typed the same thing, it typed in lower case. What would cause that behavior? Is there a way for us to turn it off?

Answer 1

Without knowing which Captcha service was being used it is difficult to say, but there are lots of ways to programmatically make something all caps. Javascript, which is common in web pages, has a method called toUpper() which could do what you indicated.

I guess the point is that is probably wasn't your computer, your browser, your keyboard, or your wife causing it to happen.

Answer 2

What would cause that behavior?

Most likely it is done using JavaScript, which can be as simple as:

<input type="text"
       onchange="this.value = this.value.toUpper()"
       onkeypress="this.value = this.value.toUpper()">

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Is there a way for us to turn it off?

Do you need to?

If you are only supposed to type upper-case letters in a text box, what's the harm if they automatically become upper-case? It's not like the website prevents you from simply typing in the usual way (holding Shift).

No, you cannot turn it off without disabling JavaScript entirely – which would break way too many websites. (In IE, this is done through Internet Options → Security → Zones.)