w3c / captcha-accessibility

Inaccessibility of CAPTCHA
https://w3c.github.io/captcha-accessibility/
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Logic Puzzle section is a bit thin #29

Open jspellman opened 5 years ago

jspellman commented 5 years ago

I thought the section on Logic Puzzles was thin and left me with the impression that "it's not ideal, but it's ok to use logic puzzles". Given that cognitive disabilities are a large segment of the population of people with disabilities, I was disappointed.

I recently had a frustrating and unpleasant experience with a .gov website that used the logic puzzle approach which required multiple attempts and wrong answers before finally receiving a question that I could answer correctly. It was shaming and embarrassing to be asked relatively simple questions that I couldn't answer correctly. Ironically, it was a site whose main audience are older people who may be experiencing age-related cognitive decline.

Logic puzzles have a strong dependency on English. They may have multiple answers which may not be accepted as correct. They discriminate against people with dyscalculia, people with short term memory loss, people with aging-related cognitive decline.

I recommend: The goal of visual verification is to separate human from machine. Simple logic tests such as, mathematical or word puzzles, trivia, or similar logic tests may raise the bar for robots, at least to the point where using them is more attractive elsewhere.

Logic tests can create barriers for users with cognitive disabilities who may have difficulty with logic-puzzle CAPTCHA approaches. Logic puzzles have a strong dependency on English. They may have multiple answers which may not be accepted as correct. They discriminate against people with dyscalculia, people with short term memory loss, people with aging-related cognitive decline. It can be embarrassing or shaming to be unable to answer "simple logic questions" in addition to the barrier introduced by the CAPTCHA.

Answers may need to be handled flexibly, if they require free-form text. Also, a system would have to maintain a vast number of questions, or shift them around programmatically, in order to keep spiders from capturing them all for use by web robots. This approach is also more likely subject to defeat by human operators engaged in crowd-sourcing activity on behalf of attackers.