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Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA

W3C, Jun 27, 2019

The "Completely Automated Public Turing Test, to Tell Computers and Humans Apart" (CAPTCHA) can be found all over the internet. I have a terrible time with it because my eyes just aren't good enough to count school buses on tiny images. As the W3C says in this report, "asking users who are blind, visually impaired or dyslexic to identify textual characters in a distorted graphic is asking them to perform a task they are intrinsically least able to accomplish." The alternative audio isn't any better. As the article notes, "Hotmail's sound output, which is itself distorted to avoid the same programmatic abuse, was unintelligible to all four test subjects, all of whom had good hearing." That's my experience as well. The article goes on to review a variety of approaches, but ultimately, there's no single best technology.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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