CAPTCHA

Last edited: 20 March 2024

Issues with CAPTCHA:

• reCAPTCHA v3 detects unusual user patterns. Guess what... some screenreader users navigate in a certain way and get flagged as bots
• Puzzles, simple mathematical or other simple tasks can still be hard for people with language, learning or cognitive disabilities.
• Privacy when using, for example, Google's CAPTCHA is at stake.
• Recognizing US store windows, fire hydrants and crosswalks is hard while they look different in other countries.
• No alternative for image text recognition which are most of the time hard to read for sighted people..
• No control over code when using external CAPTCHA tools.
• (Googles') CAPTCHA is brought to you in a language that might be not the language of the website. You can not control it.
• No control over color contrast issues and other issues. Sometimes it takes long to have these issues solved.

Solutions

• No CAPTCHA.
• Honeypots (here is what W3C says about honeypots)
• Candidate solution: Turnstile, an invisible CAPTCHA by Cloudflare

Resources

• Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA (Draft Note)
• Success Criterion 3.3.8 Accessible Authentication (Minimum)
  • Understanding: Object recognition
• Success Criterion 3.3.9 Accessible Authentication (Enhanced)
• The following Captcha's could be accessible. Please check them first before using them:
  • mCaptcha
  • Friendly Captcha