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And there are many stories like this. When CAPTCHA started to be widespread, a lot of my blind friends (including me) suddenly were blocked from using parts of the Internet. We had to find sighted help to solve just a captcha, while everything else basically worked to be done independently. You can not imagine how much sorrow and self-pity CAPTCHAs have generated. I hope the person(s) who willingly allowed this trend to happen will be hit by karma with full force.

I'm not a believer in godly stuff, but i'm sure Satan has dedicated an entire new level of hell to solving infinite CAPTCHAs loops for those who ever thought it would be a good idea to impose that on other people.

reCAPTCHA (Google's CAPTCHA) has been accessible to the blind for nearly the entirety of its existence if not the entirety outright.

Yeah, if your browser supports this and that, otherwise not. No audio? Bad luck. No JS? Bad luck.

Also, i'm assuming, maybe wrongfully so, that Google would make accessible CAPTCHAs harder to pass, with the logic that sound-based CAPTCHAs are much easier to break for a bot.

All in all, reCAPTCHA (and other modern CAPTCHAs like hCaptcha) are a usability/accessibility disaster. It should be a crime to enable that on a service to restrict access to your peers.

Browsers have been free for longer than reCAPTCHA has existed, and browsers with audio and JS have been free for longer, too. I don't like JavaScript, and I block reCAPTCHA, but it's ludicrous to pretend that Google hasn't made it as accessible as possible. There are a lot of things wrong with Google, but accessibility is one thing they're reasonably good at, and making up things to trash reCAPTCHA seems dishonest.

Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy. Significantly easier than the visual one.

> browsers with audio and JS have been free for longer, too.

How is that an excuse? It's like having a café that only lets people wearing t-shirts in. Are you wearing a sweatshirt? "Well i'm sure you can download a t-shirt for free from your cupboard or one of your friends" /s.

It's a fundamental principle of interoperability ("strict about what you offer, lax about what you accept") that an online service should try to serve anyone, whether they have this or that technology or not enabled. In the case of the web, anyone with HTML parsing technology should be able to browse it... minus some stuff that actually doesn't work without additional technology.

> Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy.

I wouldn't know, it never let me through. I have to say, as a sighted person, the only times i've tried audio CAPTCHA were when Google wouldn't let me through using visual CAPTCHA (infinite CAPTCHA loop). Not even once have i been able to pass it.

I guess once you're on Google's no-pass list, whether you fill the CAPTCHA via audio or video doesn't matter, they're just not letting you through? I find it worrying that some people accept to have a private corporation strip-search their guests on the way to the doorbell/mailbox.

You're just choosing different arbitrary lines. You can't play a triple-A video game on a PDP-11. You can't view things over ftp using Firefox. You can't do X because Y.

Literally everything is a choice of "If you refuse to use X, you will not get Y."

Most of my web browsers, including my phone's web browser, have JavaScript turned off. I can't use reCAPTCHA on the browser I'm using right now. It's not a big deal, and it's not something morally wrong. A piece of technology doesn't work if you're not using pieces of technology that operate with it. This is expected behavior.

Yeah, the CAPTCHA also doubles as a tarpit if you're deemed suffuciently undesirable.

I can only solve a few audio captchas until Google wants me to solve a real one. Audio captchas are to simple for bots.

You dont rely on accessibility, right? So please dont claim that Google is perfect in this regards. Also, using words like "ludicrous" to shame people that dont believe the propaganda is just so fucked up.

If you like larry page and his friends, say so clearly, but please dont shame people based on accessibility that is not there.

Oh, a Google believer. So tell me, how is a deaf-blind person going to solve an audio captcha? Is it OK for you to claim that a deaf-blind person ius not a human? I guess so, because google is the bomb, right?

And we dont even have to go down the deaf-blind road. I have excellent hearing, but have failed at solving audio captchas in the past. Also, please remember that there might also be a language barrier. Give an english audio captcha to a german housewive, and learn how discrimination works.

I’m not blind but for the handful of websites that I’ll engage with a reCAPTCHA for, I use the audio version. About a third of the time I switch to audio it gives me a “we’ve decided you’re a bot anyway, please try again later” message and it won’t let me attempt it at all. They disable the accessibility to the blind on a whim which is astonishing to me.

The frustrating thing is that this happens even on devices/browsers with fewer privacy measures enabled, like just using a fresh firefox temporary container or private mode (so no browsing history or existing cookies maybe?) with no script blocking is ‘suspicious’ enough that accessibility to the blind is disabled with no recourse.

So yeah, it’s accessible (when they feel like it).

Do you ever run into issues with the reCAPTCHA saying you’re not allowed to use the audio version? I’m not blind but for the handful of websites I will engage with a reCAPTCHA for I use the audio version. A third of the time I go do it I’m shown a “we’ve decided you’re a bot anyway, please try again later” message and am not allowed to complete an audio challenge. It’s infuriating! I can’t understand why it’s acceptable to just turn off accessibility on a whim. I can complete the image one if I absolutely must but that’s obviously not the case for a significant amount of people.

After years and years of captchas I still have no idea if I’m supposed to select all the poles for the traffic lights as well.

Should I click every tile that has a little bit of traffic light in it? Even with just the lamp housing that often means nearly all tiles. Somehow it doesn't seem to matter; it just works. Or not, and then I have no idea why.

Captcha bonus level: try solving one of these from a public VPN.

Yeah, it's extra frustrating that you never know when clicking a tile that contains just a tiny bit of traffic light, whether the algorithm on the other side will see it too.

I think it is best to click the tile even if it only has a small part of the "object" in it. Other instances may have the same image but the grid is offset by a few pixels. At one point the tile does not contain the object at all and won't get any clicks. That way they could determine boundaries with higher resolution than the grid cell size.

Perhaps that's on purpose? If a tile is being selected only sometimes, you can infer things from that.

I have had the same doubt. But just now I realized, that if this this is for training som self-driving AI, it is probably only the actual lights that matter. I.e the red, yellow or green signal. The rest is noise.

Those are signal/traffic/light poles: https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/lighting/signal-poles

https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/...

I could not reasonably answer that question but I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"

This is a great and wise insight !

Unfortunately, yes it is. It's a sad state of the computer industry that these technological marvels that once filled everyone with admiration and joy has been reduced to that.

> Being 100% computer illiterate

I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online.

> I could not reasonably answer that question

I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this:

When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights.

> I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"

What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.

Not OP obviously, but I’ve seen superficially similar cases. It is hard to put in words, but some people just wouldn’t need to be online/on smartphones if it wasn’t for the pandemic, and they wouldn’t have any specific issue in their day to day life.

Perhaps drawing a parallel with social networks could help: when such a huge portion of the population is on facebook properties, it could look crazy to not have a facebook account. Perhaps there wasn’t enough help to explain how it works ? But we understand not dealing with facebook has upsides, and while it creates hurdles, they can be worked around. We wouldn’t push someone to go on facebook if they had no need to.

Obviously we are talking about exceptional cases, but if they were happy as they were, it could be worth keeping it that way if they don’t have an appetite for changing.

> but some people just wouldn’t need to be online/on smartphones if it wasn’t for the pandemic, and they wouldn’t have any specific issue in their day to day life.

But now the pandemic has happened, being online is more important than ever, and there's probably no going back. I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind. I know that pessimism and cynicism about the Internet are fashionable these days. But we're still here, discussing things online. If we're not willing to throw that away ourselves, then maybe we need to give those people more of a chance to decide for themselves if it's worthwhile.

> I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind

My interest is on what you see as actions related to that. We're a community mostly on the building the web side, bearing at least some responsibility of what "being online" means today.

Your describing them as left behind makes me think you see the current web as the way forward, but I don't know if it's a fair assumption on your position.

Arguably I see their lack of using online tools up to this point as a failure of those tools to provide enough value for the hassle, and the issues would be less to bring this people along than to come up with ways to bridge their world and ours.

We often talk of digital litteracy as if it was an unavoidable skill, but I kind think it's like positing that Amazonia tribes have to learn english. It could be better for them, but we could also have adaptation layers that make it work for them even if they stay in their culture and lifestyle.

Fair points. You're right; the web is at least in part what our community decides to make it. So it's not inevitable that we have to drag others kicking and screaming into the current web that we didn't really design for them in the first place.

Speaking of adaptation layers, my own expertise is in accessibility for blind people. There's some debate in the online blind community about the merits of devices and user interfaces designed specifically for blind people, versus retrofitting a screen reader onto a mainstream GUI. Given the prevalence of proprietary walled gardens, the staggering complexity of even the open web, and the need for blind people to participate in mainstream society, it's inevitable that we have to rely on the latter to some extent. But that doesn't mean that blind people have to live with only the level of accessibility and usability that mainstream platform companies choose to provide, ad least as long as one mainstream platform is open enough to allow for third-party adaptations.

So maybe there's also a need for alternative UIs for people who, for whatever reason, aren't familiar with the conventions of the mainstream Internet, such as email inboxes. It would be important, though, to make sure such attempts at alternative UIs don't come off as condescending (like, say, Microsoft Bob).

I'd appreciate feedback on possible reasons why my comment got multiple downvotes. Did my attempted explanation of CAPTCHAs come off as condescending? I specifically tried to avoid that. I also wasn't criticizing the parent commenter for not being able to come up with an explanation in the moment. Or was there something else objectionable about what I wrote?

Edit: OK, in hindsight, my explanation was incomplete. I should have added something like: The general idea is that Zoom is asking you to do something that a computer program can't reliably do. Unfortunately, as computers get better at performing simple tasks that used to require human intelligence, it becomes more challenging for a computer to determine that you're a person and not another computer. That's why it has gotten to the point of asking you to click on the tiles with traffic lights.

I think you were downvoted undeservedly but what you maybe don't understand is that some people's brains just don't work at this level of abstraction no matter how you break it down and use simple words. Your explanation might just as well have been written in Japanese, it would just not register.

I know it logically follows that some people have that limitation; it's a function of the nervous system that can be limited or absent, just like one's senses or mobility. But my experience has been that blind people in particular tend to be underestimated and not given enough of a chance. So I guess my inclination was to expect that this would be the case with Kristine as well. You actually worked with her, so if you tried to explain things to her and she just didn't get it, then of course I have no reason to doubt you.