Also, i'm assuming, maybe wrongfully so, that Google would make accessible CAPTCHAs harder to pass, with the logic that sound-based CAPTCHAs are much easier to break for a bot.

All in all, reCAPTCHA (and other modern CAPTCHAs like hCaptcha) are a usability/accessibility disaster. It should be a crime to enable that on a service to restrict access to your peers.

Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy. Significantly easier than the visual one.

How is that an excuse? It's like having a café that only lets people wearing t-shirts in. Are you wearing a sweatshirt? "Well i'm sure you can download a t-shirt for free from your cupboard or one of your friends" /s.

It's a fundamental principle of interoperability ("strict about what you offer, lax about what you accept") that an online service should try to serve anyone, whether they have this or that technology or not enabled. In the case of the web, anyone with HTML parsing technology should be able to browse it... minus some stuff that actually doesn't work without additional technology.

> Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy.

I wouldn't know, it never let me through. I have to say, as a sighted person, the only times i've tried audio CAPTCHA were when Google wouldn't let me through using visual CAPTCHA (infinite CAPTCHA loop). Not even once have i been able to pass it.

I guess once you're on Google's no-pass list, whether you fill the CAPTCHA via audio or video doesn't matter, they're just not letting you through? I find it worrying that some people accept to have a private corporation strip-search their guests on the way to the doorbell/mailbox.

Literally everything is a choice of "If you refuse to use X, you will not get Y."

Most of my web browsers, including my phone's web browser, have JavaScript turned off. I can't use reCAPTCHA on the browser I'm using right now. It's not a big deal, and it's not something morally wrong. A piece of technology doesn't work if you're not using pieces of technology that operate with it. This is expected behavior.

If you like larry page and his friends, say so clearly, but please dont shame people based on accessibility that is not there.

And we dont even have to go down the deaf-blind road. I have excellent hearing, but have failed at solving audio captchas in the past. Also, please remember that there might also be a language barrier. Give an english audio captcha to a german housewive, and learn how discrimination works.

The frustrating thing is that this happens even on devices/browsers with fewer privacy measures enabled, like just using a fresh firefox temporary container or private mode (so no browsing history or existing cookies maybe?) with no script blocking is ‘suspicious’ enough that accessibility to the blind is disabled with no recourse.

So yeah, it’s accessible (when they feel like it).

Captcha bonus level: try solving one of these from a public VPN.

https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/...

This is a great and wise insight !

I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online.

> I could not reasonably answer that question

I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this:

When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights.

> I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"

What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.

Perhaps drawing a parallel with social networks could help: when such a huge portion of the population is on facebook properties, it could look crazy to not have a facebook account. Perhaps there wasn’t enough help to explain how it works ? But we understand not dealing with facebook has upsides, and while it creates hurdles, they can be worked around. We wouldn’t push someone to go on facebook if they had no need to.

Obviously we are talking about exceptional cases, but if they were happy as they were, it could be worth keeping it that way if they don’t have an appetite for changing.

But now the pandemic has happened, being online is more important than ever, and there's probably no going back. I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind. I know that pessimism and cynicism about the Internet are fashionable these days. But we're still here, discussing things online. If we're not willing to throw that away ourselves, then maybe we need to give those people more of a chance to decide for themselves if it's worthwhile.

My interest is on what you see as actions related to that. We're a community mostly on the building the web side, bearing at least some responsibility of what "being online" means today.

Your describing them as left behind makes me think you see the current web as the way forward, but I don't know if it's a fair assumption on your position.

Arguably I see their lack of using online tools up to this point as a failure of those tools to provide enough value for the hassle, and the issues would be less to bring this people along than to come up with ways to bridge their world and ours.

We often talk of digital litteracy as if it was an unavoidable skill, but I kind think it's like positing that Amazonia tribes have to learn english. It could be better for them, but we could also have adaptation layers that make it work for them even if they stay in their culture and lifestyle.

Speaking of adaptation layers, my own expertise is in accessibility for blind people. There's some debate in the online blind community about the merits of devices and user interfaces designed specifically for blind people, versus retrofitting a screen reader onto a mainstream GUI. Given the prevalence of proprietary walled gardens, the staggering complexity of even the open web, and the need for blind people to participate in mainstream society, it's inevitable that we have to rely on the latter to some extent. But that doesn't mean that blind people have to live with only the level of accessibility and usability that mainstream platform companies choose to provide, ad least as long as one mainstream platform is open enough to allow for third-party adaptations.

So maybe there's also a need for alternative UIs for people who, for whatever reason, aren't familiar with the conventions of the mainstream Internet, such as email inboxes. It would be important, though, to make sure such attempts at alternative UIs don't come off as condescending (like, say, Microsoft Bob).

Edit: OK, in hindsight, my explanation was incomplete. I should have added something like: The general idea is that Zoom is asking you to do something that a computer program can't reliably do. Unfortunately, as computers get better at performing simple tasks that used to require human intelligence, it becomes more challenging for a computer to determine that you're a person and not another computer. That's why it has gotten to the point of asking you to click on the tiles with traffic lights.