I mean, I’ve sometimes had to try three or four times with certain captures and I have perfect eyesight (with my glasses). I feel so badly for those with vision or hearing issues with an empathy I never had when I was younger. They are so often simply forgotten.
I'm kinda surprised that ADA doesn't allow them to sue site owners about this.
I contacted several attorneys, none of whom would consider taking the case, or even bother to discuss the details with me. One of them told me that, at least in North Carolina, an employer would effectively have to get on the stand and explicitly confess taking adverse actions against me specifically because I had been diagnosed with MS. Any other remotely plausible excuse would provide them with all the cover necessary.
It was only much later that I learned that I would have had to have filed a complaint with the EEOC and NLRB within 180-days, and allow them to investigate my claims fully before authorizing such a lawsuit to begin with, as without such a determination I could not file the suit anyway. None of the attorneys I consulted even mentioned this absolutely critical first step, which suggests that they had even less faith in a successful outcome.
Maybe it’s different for facilities and regulatory enforcement, but in my experience, at least for labor, the protections are incredibly weak.
You could already see the writing on the wall with image identification years ago, when the obscuration techniques became more elaborate. It was an arms race. I was having trouble with them. I can see less technically inclined being able to use them. I imagined how much worse it was for people with color blindness, disabilities, or people forced to use them at public library computers because that is all they have.
Open source capcha projects have either not been clued in, or don’t have the resources to pull this off. Google didn’t just switch out which signals they tested, they also wrote an obfuscating virtual machine executing within the browser environment (if I remember that article taking about this correctly). That was years ago and who knows what they do now — for all we know, the “byte code” running the test is now a neural net of some kind.