Your daily frequent11y newsletter, brought to you by @ChrisBAshton:
- I’ve just heard about this product by AccessibleApps, which fills in CAPTCHA forms for you. For the uninitiated, CAPTCHAs are those anti-bot questions which try to make you prove you’re human by, for example, showing you a garbled image and making you type out the letter and number sequence contained within it.
- CAPTCHA Be Gone is an extension for Chrome, Firefox and IE, aimed at visually impaired and deafblind users who find it difficult or impossible to complete any form which has a CAPTCHA.
- Listen to a demo of it working: it’s slow (taking around 15 seconds), but seems to work. It’s not free though, costing $3.50 per month. There’s a seemingly impartial review which is positive about its price and effectiveness.
- It’s great that this is a solution to a real problem faced by users. But it raises two points from me:
- If a browser extension can solve a CAPTCHA, what’s the point of having a CAPTCHA in the first place?
- Having a disability already comes with a price tag; it’s unfair that these users need to pay for workarounds just for basic website access.
- Hopefully the web can move on from frustrating CAPTCHAs in favour of more accessible alternatives.
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