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Ending CAPTCHA once and for all
Transcript
11 August 2013
Roberta: If you’ve ever tried to do something online only to be thwarted by a CAPTCHA test, this news will brighten your day. A campaign has started to call on major website companies to put an end to CAPTCHAs once and for all. Eliza Cussen, online editor for Media Access Australia, is here to tell us all about it. Hello, Eliza.
Eliza Cussen: Hi Roberta.
Roberta: Now, first of all, what is a CAPTCHA?
Eliza Cussen: Well, basically they are little tests that are placed at the end of an online form, which try to verify if a user is a human being, or what we call a bot. And bots are small pieces of software which travel across the Internet impersonating humans, and kind of, I guess, compromising the security of websites.
Roberta: And why are they such a problem?
Eliza Cussen: Well, as many listeners will know, CAPTCHAs really present a barrier for everyone. It’s getting harder and harder for computers to tell the difference between a human and a bot, and it’s getting harder and harder for people to prove that they are human, if that makes sense.
Roberta: Oh, dear.
Eliza Cussen: So the standard CAPTCHA is really a series of garbled letters; they look kind of wavy or they are distorted in some way, so that the human eye can distinguish them, but a computer can’t. For sighted people they are incredibly annoying and often impossible to complete. And of course if you are blind or severely vision impaired, they actually stop you from completing the form.
Roberta: So what about audio CAPTCHAs?
Eliza Cussen: Well, a few years ago people got wise to the fact that CAPTCHAs present an impenetrable barrier for blind people and started putting in audio versions. And all that is, it’s a small audio file which, the same thing, is a phrase or a series of letters or numbers read out that is distorted. I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried an audio CAPTCHA, Roberta, but they sound like ham radios from the 20s. I’ve never been able to work one out myself. And I know a colleague of mine must have tried about 30 times to complete the one for Skype before giving up and asking a sighted friend to help. So obviously they are not an ideal solution.
Roberta: No, absolutely, not. How does this campaign intend to help?
Eliza Cussen: Well, this campaign was started by, I guess, our sister organisation, ACCAN, and we’ve signed onto it along with Blind Citizens Australia and a number of other organisations. And what we are really asking, well, we’re asking the biggest companies in the web, people like Microsoft and Google and Facebook, to actually ban the CAPTCHAs across their networks, which is quite a big, quite a big ask. But we are asking them to show leadership and hope that this flows onto the rest of the web.
Roberta: I hope so, too. Now, how can people get involved?
Eliza Cussen: Well, they can go to change.org, which is a wonderful site for anyone interested in online activism, and it’s reasonably accessible as well. So if you go to Change.org and then search at the top for Kill CAPTCHA. Now, I’m going to have to spell CAPTCHA because…
Roberta: I was going to say that.
Eliza Cussen: Yes, because it’s a funny one. It’s one of those ridiculous acronyms. So CAPTCHA is C-A-P-T-C-H-A.
Roberta: All right then, well, I’ve been speaking to Eliza Cussen, online editor for Media Access Australia. And for more information about the CAPTCHA, C-A-P-T-C-H-A campaign, visit Media Access Australia. Thank you, Eliza, for all of that.
Eliza Cussen: No worries, Roberta.
Roberta: And I hope that we get some people to get involved, because it really does have to be eliminated, doesn’t it?
Eliza Cussen: It really, really does. Well, the petition is going quite well. We’re up to about 850 now.
Roberta: Oh, that’s fantastic. Good on you. That’s great.
Eliza Cussen: Yeah, thank you.
Roberta: Well, that’s very exciting, indeed. And if you’d like to know more about the CAPTCHAs – it sounds a little bit not very good to me – but you can contact Media Access Australia, mediaaccess.org.au, and find out how you can help with this campaign. This segment has been brought to you by Media Access Australia.