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reCAPTCHA replacement

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From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Dec 4, 2014 7:10AM

Interesting post from Google on their update/replacement for re-CAPTCHA:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/are-you-robot-introducing-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.