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Comment by wild_preference | Hacker News Reader

ReCaptcha, of all things, has pretty good accessibility measures. Likely more than the site in which it's embedded.

Nobody is claiming it's perfect. But notice how nobody here is analyzing why people use ReCaptcha in the first place nor providing alternatives.

If you knew nothing of ReCaptcha and only read these comments, you'd wonder if it was a gag website operators put on their website for self-amusement, which is basically how I looked at homework as a kid. But I feel like this discussion is a bit more one-sided than I expected on HN, a place where I would've thought more people had experience running a website and how immediately effective ReCaptcha was the second you added a <textarea>.

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No. They say they do, but neither me not any of the team that tried it was able to complete a single test of the ReCAPTCHA accessible fallbacks. 0%. This was a couple of years ago, but at that point at least putting ReCAPTCHA into a site was putting a fixed roadblock in for people with visual impairments strong enough to force them down their audio route.

When is the last time you tried? I completed the accessible fallback first try. Were you using headphones?

You're going to lose users or time/money with any abuse prevention. But you lose even more by letting things like spammers run rampant on your platform. You're stuck analyzing trade-offs, not ignoring reality.

Once again, all trails lead back to you providing some alternative solutions instead of the empty catharsis of coming up with downsides to something in an internet comment.

Here's one of my own: Isn't it annoying that spambots show up the second I launch a website? Ugh! Well, got that out of the way. Now I need a solution.

What's yours?

You sound irritated that people find Recaptcha irritating.

It's not about disliking anti-spam measures, it's about highlighting the woeful method that is re-captcha.

"Select all squares with street signs" shows a bunch of squares, some of them contain only part of the pole that presumably has a sign attached out of shot. So do you click that square that only has the pole? A pole is not a sign, it's a piece of steel. But it's part of the sign, so are people expected to select it or not?

Re-captcha is not a smart system.

Not to mention, you're basically providing free mechanical turk style work for google. Back when it started with digitizing books, alright sure thats helping an open initiative to do something good. When I have to click cars and trees and traffic lights in order to post a comment, Google, is having me do work for them, and I'd rather not work for them, even if its only a few seconds at a time here or there.

> A pole is not a sign

Guess we can close the file on that one.

I don't see reCAPTCHA use being limited to this sort of case at all.

On the contrary, many websites use it as an initial gate before I get to see anything.

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