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Re: reCAPTCHA replacement

for

From: Randy Pope
Date: Dec 5, 2014 8:50PM

Speaking as a deaf-blind person, both legally blind with little sight and
deaf, I just did a quick review of Google new replacement.

Firefox: When I first click on the link, I got this checkbox message asking
me if I'm not a robot. I click that and it appears I got through. No
graphic photo or CAPTCHA to deal with. That's good. Five minutes later I
again test the site but this time the old reCAPTCHA appeared on the screen
which required me to type in the information on the image. Since I cannot
see the screen well enough, I was unable to type in the information, I'm
also deaf which may the audio challenge completely useless for me.

IE 11: I follow the same steps as I did with Firefox and got the same
result. I have tried closing IE and click on the same link at different
time, ten minute apart and still got the same result.

To me this Google new replacement remains to be inaccessible for the people
who are deaf-blind. Thank you, Alastair, for sharing this link. This
information has re-generated my energy and reinforce my belief against
CAPTCHA in any form.

Randy Pope

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED>
[mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Alastair Campbell
Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2014 9:11 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: [WebAIM] reCAPTCHA replacement

Interesting post from Google on their update/replacement for re-CAPTCHA:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/are-you-robot-introduci
ng-no-captcha.html

The short story is that they are replacing the current CAPTCHA method
(distorted image-text or distorted audio) with a simple tickbox for "I am
not a robot". They then use some heuristics based on IP address, browser
config, mouse pointer behaviour etc. to guess if you are a robot.

That bit about using mouse movements to analyse your human-ness obviously
rang alarm bells, and I couldn't find an example easily, so I created one
here:
https://alastairc.ac/testing/recaptcha-test.html

At first glance, it is keyboard accessible, has appropriate ARIA attributes
(which are needed as they use a span for a checkbox), and it didn't fail
when I only used the keyboard.

Overall, it looks like an important improvement from an accessibility point
of view. If the heuristics fail you then you get the traditional CAPTCHA
approach, however, that should be a lot less frequent.

It would be interesting to see how the image-matching version works from an
accessibility point of view, I didn't find a way to trigger that within my
lunch break.

-Alastair

PS. Alt text for the images in the blog post:
1. A traditional CAPTCHA where you have to type in the distorted words
shown, or choose the audio option.
2. An animated image showing a checkbox with label "I'm not a robot", and
the reCAPTCHA logo.
3. The checkbox shows the traditional method underneath.
4 & 5. Two examples of the checkbox showing an image of a cat, and then nine
images underneath that to match against.
messages to <EMAIL REMOVED>