All About Access

I guess Google doesn’t get it when it comes to visual verification systems…. One might even suggest that they were being

I thought they got it when they removed their visual verification requirement for creating gmail accounts and resetting Google account passwords. And I was further encouraged when a real, live human responded to my email regarding the continued visual verification requirement for creating a new Google account:

Hi Joanmarie,

Thank you for your note and your patience. We very much appreciate your concerns, and we’ve passed your email along to the appropriate team.

Please be assured we’re taking this issue seriously.

Regards,
The Google Team

So when all the hype hit yesterday about My Search History becoming available at Google Labs, and I discovered that the Google Account page still had the visual verification requirement, I decided not to complain here at All About Access. I realize change comes slowly. And they are taking this issue seriously, right? So instead, I sent a note off to the My Search History feedback address:

To: labs+hist-feedback@google.com
Subject: please remove the visual verification requirement

Hi. In order to use My Search History, the user must create an account. In order to create an account, the user must type the characters shown in a picture. This test is inaccessible to users who are blind. Please remove the visual verification requirement so that all users can use My Search History.

Thank you in advance for your time and attention to this matter.

I got the expected automated reply and decided to hope for the best. Now I’m not so sure hoping is enough. I must have been snoozing because I missed this announcement from April 12th at Blogger Buzz:

Today Blogger has implemented captcha (a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not the user is human) on new blog creation. We’re doing this to stay a step ahead of spammers who would try to automatically create thousands of blogs for nefarious reasons.

I went to blogger.com — which is owned by Google — and tried to set up a new blog. As soon as I got to Step 2, there was the Visual Verification requirement — with no alternative means of access.

The ironic thing is that the link to Captcha they included in their blog is to an article which contains an entire section on Accessibility! And it’s not a vague section, by any means. Check it out:

Accessibility

Captchas based on reading text — or other visual-perception tasks — prevent visually impaired users from accessing the protected resource. However, captchas do not have to be visual. Any hard artificial intelligence problem, such as speech recognition, can be used as the basis of a captcha. Some implementations of captchas permit users to opt for an audio captcha. The development of audio captchas appears to have lagged behind that of visual captchas, however, and presently may not be as effective.

For non-sighted users (for example blind users), visual captchas present serious problems. Because captchas are designed to be unreadable by machines, common assistive technology tools such as screen readers cannot interpret them. Since captchas are often used in initial registration processes (for example eBay and Yahoo!, and some other sites), this challenge can completely block access.

Even for perfectly sighted individuals, new generations of captchas, designed to overcome sophisticated recognition software, can be very hard or impossible to read. Even some of the demo captchas at the software sites listed below are indecipherable to many if not all humans.

The W3C paper Inaccessibility of Visually-Oriented Anti-Robot Tests outlined some of the accessibility problems with captchas.

Maybe the folks at Google figured, “We have to link something to the word ‘captcha’. Wikipedia is a well-respected source.” But then they failed to take the time to read what they were linking to. I am going to hold onto that because I really don’t want to believe that they read it and just didn’t care….

Regardless of intent, it is evil to prevent users who are blind from accessing Google services. So the question is, how does one get the attention of the powers that be in GoogleLand?

–jd

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 21st, 2005 at 2:00 pm and is filed under Barriers to Access, Visual Verification Systems. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.