Cindy, For the record, your post was measured and fair. By contrast, it’s disappointing when someone involved in assisting visually impaired computer users fails to accept opposition to any technology that shuts out a group, no matter how small that group. For the most part, CAPTCHA is a fortress gate that keeps visually impaired people out. End of story. No matter how ingenious it may be, any technology that denies admission to a group legitimately seeking access is a failure. Moreover, in the case of visually impaired people, access to technology is more crucial than for almost any other group. CAPTCHA needs to be rejected and another ingenious method devised. Indeed, as I believe Brian acknowledges somewhere, CAPTCHA is being phased out, but way too slowly. Arguments along these lines should not be diminished as being merely angry.
From: Cindy Ray [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 06, 2016 11:03 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: What is the issue with Captchas? I think you think I am angry because of this statement, which I quoted from Gerald’s post: And the reason this situation exists in the first place is that the blindness advocacy groups which are supposed to look out for our best interests have shown absolutely no willingness to challenge online sellers who insist on confronting their customers, blind and sighted alike, with image captchas whose value at thwarting hackers is dubious at best. I quoted the statement, which I should have surrounded with quotes, to say what it was I am talking about. It was not mine. Now on to high and holy things—writing liturgy for Sunday. LOL. Cindy From: Brian Vogel [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, January 6, 2016 9:53 AM To: [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> Subject: Re: What is the issue with Captchas? Cindy Lou, I want to be clear that I was trying to state that your anger, which there was in that post, was entirely justifiable but that your assertion, "with image captchas whose value at thwarting hackers is dubious at best," was not. The value of Captchas for that particular security purpose is incredibly strong and well documented. It made a very wide array of bot based attacks vanish and stay vanished. That was the focus of my comment to you. The rest was more general. I can never understand the degree of frustration that has been expressed in this thread other than in the abstract because I do know that the issues you all have identified don't affect me. But at the same time there seems to be an undercurrent of, "this is a plot against accessibility," which it most certainly was not. There are also a lot of Captcha imitators who, to put it mildly, have never even attempted to support accessibility. I could post links to a number of web pages I know of that use the "image of distorted letters but with no alternate nor audio" verification method, and hasten to add that these are not Captchas, though I get entirely why the term Captcha has become generic much like Kleenex, Jello, Frigidaire, Xerox, and many others before it. Everyone who holds the trademarks on these gets really upset when they become "the generic term" because those who are doing knock-offs are generally not doing good or faithful ones. I just want to emphasize that the Captcha folks already recognize what a barrier even the "improved" version can be, hence the move to reCaptcha that I mentioned earlier. There really is, believe it or not, a genuine concern with accessibility and thinking about it ahead of time by most major companies these days. Some are still caught with the technology (e.g., conventional Captchas) that they have until the next release of their development cycle catches up. Others, however, really don't give a flying rat's patootie and should be pilloried for that. Brian
