There’s a good piece in the current issue of .net magazine on the evil that is CAPTCHA – images of letters and numbers distorted to nearly, but not quite, the point of illegibility. Alastair Campbell, their ‘Access All Areas’ guru, makes a series of good points, viz. everybody hates them, even people with 20/20 vision have trouble with them, they’ve all been broken, they’re sent to sweatshops in the Far East for ‘translation’, and also not all spam is submitted by robots: human beings can be malicious too, just more slowly.
But something has been troubling me about these things for a while: aren’t they illegal? The Disability Discrimination Act requires that the same experience is offered to everyone regardless of physical impairment. Blocking a visually-impaired user seems to be pretty clearly in breach of this; and even if an alternative is provided, such as audio, now you’re excluding the deaf-blind, and so on and on.
It’s surely just a matter of time before a court case tests the as-yet woolly extent of the DDA’s provisions as they apply to websites. The RNIB keeps threatening to bring one, but the threat seems to have been enough in each case so far to get modifications made to the offending site. But when it happens, and it will, I wouldn’t bet against CAPTCHAs having to be ripped out of millions of sites across the UK and beyond. And not a moment too soon.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 8th, 2009 at 5:14 pm and is filed under accessibility, websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.