When a website needs its visitors to prove they’re human, what is the most common technique developers use? If you’ve used the internet, you already know the answer. It’s CAPTCHA.
Ever wondered what all those letters stand for? Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Now you can win Jeopardy if that question is ever asked.
CAPTCHA is generally easy for people with normal eyesight to complete, but it presents a lot of problems for people like me with vision impairments. We need an alternative that isn’t just visual.
For example, I wanted to contribute to the accessibility pages on Wikipedia recently and decided to make an account. I thought the process would be easy to register and start making edits, but I was quickly proved wrong. It requires solving a CAPTCHA.
I thought there might be an alternative method to complete my registration, but the whole exercise to find an alternative on Wikipedia frustrated me. In fact, I never found an alternative that day that used audio or a one-time confirmation code sent to a mobile device.
This is what it’s like to be a visually impaired person who uses the internet. Even the world’s most popular sites aren’t completely [...]