WebAIM - Web Accessibility In Mind

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Re: CAPTCHA

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From: deborah.kaplan
Date: Nov 5, 2014 9:33AM

Anything simple and straightforward enough to not have cognitive accessibility problems can honestly be solved by computer. Simple arithmetic questions written in English can be trivially parsed by a spambot. The only reason these work now is that they are so rare that it is not worth the spammers' while to defeat them, but if we ever succeed in convincing people these systems should be widespread, it's easy enough to write code that beats them.

It's like how park rangers have discovered that there is no kind of trashcan simple enough for humans that is too complicated for bears. Except in this case "bears" means "spammers."

Ultimately we need to make the various other solutions (e.g. honeypot, etc.) easy enough to implement that people stop using capture altogether, because there simply is not an accessible solution.

Deborah Kaplan

On Wed, 5 Nov 2014, Andrews, David B (DEED) wrote:

> The systems that involve text, that is they ask a question to which you type in a response, such as what is two plus two? Would be accessible.