This patch extends the functionality of the CAPTCHA plugin by the dokuwiki founder Andreas Gohr. It adds
The first 2 changes a simply visual, the third change I consider as critical. I made a pull request at Feb 6, 2017. There was a short discussion but no further progress since. As I think it could be useful for others I provide a patch. The patch name contains the version string of the corresponding plugin version always. I'll try to keep updated for each new (latest) plugin version. On the other side I didn't have to made changes since the initial change round about in 2014.
Download latest: captcha-patch-latest (sha256sum)
Download the patch and extract it. The archive contains a file captcha.css with some style changes too - see Configuration section below later on. Apply the patch as follows (replace  <version> 
with the correct version string):
$> cd <dokuwiki_root>/lib/plugins/captcha $> patch --verbose -p1 < /path/to/the/captcha-<version>.patch
The new config options are now available in the plugins→captcha section of the Configuration Manager. Some more visual styles could be customized by editing  captcha.css 
.  Create folders and files mentioned in the next steps if they don't exists. Assuming the used template is the default dokuwiki, copy  captcha.css 
into  conf/tpl/dokuwiki/ 
. Edit  style.ini 
inside this folder and add a line  captcha.css                = screen 
in the stylesheets section:
; Define additional stylesheets for the template here. The format have to ; identical to the "style.ini" file. [stylesheets] ;css/user.css = screen captcha.css = screen ... <snip>
Now you can customize your styles using  captcha.css 
. Add  [&|?]purge=true 
to your address bar to make changes take effect immediately!