Draft Note: Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA

Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA

https://www.w3.org/TR/2021/DNOTE-turingtest-20211216/

Published by
 Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group

Abstract

Various approaches have been employed over many years to distinguish human users of web sites from robots. The traditional CAPTCHA approach asking users to identify obscured text in an image remains common, but other approaches have emerged. All interactive approaches require users to perform a task believed to be relatively easy for humans but difficult for robots. Unfortunately the very nature of the interactive task inherently excludes many people with disabilities, resulting in a denial of service to these users. Research findings also indicate that many popular CAPTCHA techniques are no longer particularly effective or secure, further complicating the challenge of providing services secured from robotic intrusion yet accessible to people with disabilities. This document examines a number of approaches that allow systems to test for human users and the extent to which these approaches adequately accommodate people with disabilities, including recent non-interactive and tokenized approaches. We have grouped these approaches by two category classifications: Stand-Alone Approaches that can be deployed on a web host without engaging the services of unrelated third parties and Multi-Party Approaches that engage the services of an unrelated third party.

Status of the Document

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C technical reports index at https://www.w3.org/TR/. 

This is a draft update to the Inaccessibilty of CAPTCHA Working Group Note published in 2019. The document is published as a Working Draft now to collect feedback on updates to the issues and solutions since then. After incorporation of feedback the Working Group plans to advance this document back to Note status. 

The APA Working Group particularly seeks feedback on the following questions: 
 
  * The use of W3C technologies to remove the need for interactive CAPTCHAs 
  * The use of Turing Tokens 
  * Information about recent alternatives to the use of CAPTCHA challenges. 
  * Comments concerning the discussion in the document of barriers that CAPTCHA creates for people with disabilities.  

To comment, file an issue in the W3C captcha-accessibility GitHub repository. If this is not feasible, send email to public-apa@w3.org (comment archive). Comments are requested by 28 January 2022. In-progress updates to the document may be viewed in the publicly visible editors' draft. 

This document was published by the Accessible Platform Architectures Working Group as a Group Draft Note using the Note track.

Group Draft Notes are not endorsed by W3C nor its Members.

This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than work in progress.

The W3C Patent Policy does not carry any licensing requirements or commitments on this document.

This document is governed by the 2 November 2021 W3C Process Document.

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Received on Thursday, 16 December 2021 17:52:33 UTC