techstep ([personal profile] techstep) wrote in [community profile] accessibility_fail 2010-09-17 05:58 pm (UTC)

I'm a able-bodied friend of [personal profile] mathsnerd's, and I was just discussing this with her and she asked me to post here.

My hearing is generally pretty good -- I'm a veteran shortwave radio listener, spent a lot of time listening to noisy experimental music, and can otherwise do a decent job of extracting signals from noisy audio -- but the audio version of Google CAPTCHA is nothing short of awful. I listened to a clip several times while trying to create an account, and couldn't figure out, for the life of me, what the hell was going on.

I understand that voice recognition technology for discrete letters and numbers has become pretty decent. And I understand they need to develop anti-spam techniques. But if Google's "accessible" CAPTCHA is failing for amateur audio engineers, then they're just using "accessible" as a marketing label.

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