- From: John Foliot <jfoliot@stanford.edu>
- Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 15:38:08 -0700 (PDT)
- To: "'Silvia Pfeiffer'" <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com>, "'Matt May'" <mattmay@adobe.com>
- Cc: "'Gregory J. Rosmaita'" <oedipus@hicom.net>, <public-html-a11y@w3.org>
Silvia Pfeiffer wrote: > > So CAPTCHAs really need to introduce another dimension aside from the > visual and the aural - the tactile - and provide a braille CAPTCHA of > some sort. Sounds like a nice research project to me... Hi Silvia, This is (IMHO) the wrong path to be following - it's a prescriptive path with diminishing returns as it assumes that all deaf/blind users will actually be able to read Braille. It's targeting specific end-users, rather than targeting the actual problem statement which is, "how do we determine that any given user is a human and not a machine"? > I checked the spec and CAPTCHA is used as an example of an img element > that doesn't have a @alt description. I guess that is a fair enough > example. > > Maybe we could propose to add a sentence underneath that example to > state that the use of CAPTCHAs is not encouraged by the W3C for all > the reasons mentioned here? Namely it's just "security by obscurity", > people have problems deciphering them and deaf-blind users have no > means of dealing with them (at least until the introduction of a > braille dimension to CAPTCHAs). I note that Laura just posted the related bits and bobs that currently surround this issue in HTML5. For many of us, "don't use CAPTCHAs - the end" is the answer rather than trying to repair a broken tool that fails on its basic premise on many levels; it is going to be inaccessible to groups of users (what of low-vision users who don't read Braille?), it fails on real security, it shifts anti-spamming problems onto your users rather than dealing with it internally, and on, and on, and on. Matt may wrote a great piece on this a few years back: http://www.w3.org/TR/turingtest/ If I got 3 wishes to modify anything in HTML5 I wanted, I'd have a hard time deciding, but if making CAPTCHAs be non-conforming entities was an option, that would likely make my personal short list. JF
Received on Wednesday, 17 March 2010 22:38:41 UTC