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Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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