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Comment by unknownaccount | Hacker News Reader

Why isn’t this considered discrimination against the visually impaired?

With some Captcha solutions I encountered, there is a button that instead lets you listen to a (noisy) sound clip of a string of characters being read aloud which you have to type back.

Which is like a plaintext equivalent, so if the clip is easier to guess spammers will just do that instead.

I'm not an expert of legalities around accessibility, but taking the ADA as an inspiration, IIRC the Captcha provider does not have to provide an accessible alternative that works equivalently, only one that allows the same outcome for users with accessibility needs.

(I've seen this explained based on accounts of a public library built in the US which had stairs, but no elevators, for a specific section - this was still ADA compliant as they had staff on hand to serve readers in that specific section)

So a 30s delay or whatever it takes to limit spammers is probably not entirely unthinkable.

If you’re going through the trouble of solving an audio captcha, a 30 second delay isn’t going to bother you.

Remember that the whole trick of a spammer is that you aren’t able to see that his many actions are coming from one source. Otherwise it would be trivial to block. So there’s not a lot stopping a spammer from running many 30 second delays in parallel.

>With some Captcha solutions I encountered, there is a button that instead lets you listen to a (noisy) sound clip of a string of characters being read aloud which you have to type back.

there was this button, but it didnt work, but maybe that was because of my sound configuration or something? idk

games tend to steal sound device and the game was in the background

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