Blind Citizens NZ was honoured to have the Minister for Disability Issues, Hon Tariana Turia launch our brief “Does your website shut the door in our face?”, on 21 November 2013.

Blind Citizens NZ was honoured to have the Minister for Disability Issues, Hon Tariana Turia launch our brief “Does your website shut the door in our face?”, on 21 November 2013.

This briefing document is a supplement to “The Great Barrier Brief”. Funded by Internet NZ, it explains that “CAPTCHA is a process that attempts to determine whether the response received by a server has come from a human (who is obviously using a computer) or from a computer under the control of an automated (and presumably hostile) application.” Since in both situations, the response received by the server is in a computerised form, the test involves sending what is referred to as a “challenge to which only a human could correctly respond…” We also explain that “…CAPTCHA is most commonly implemented as a visual test whereby letters and/or words are displayed in a distorted manner that a human can be expected to decipher but a computer cannot. Obviously such a test inherently discriminates against blind and vision impaired people…”

Check out our brief to learn more about CAPTCHA and the barriers this creates for blind website users…