At a Parliamentary function hosted for us on 21 November by the Minister for Disability Issues, the Hon Tariana Turia, we launched our latest briefing document called “Does Your Website Shut the Door in Our Face?”. This publication draws attention to the problem of CAPTCHAs which often appear on today’s websites. This compliments our other briefing documents including one on website accessibility in general, and emphasises the human rights issues that are involved particularly for websites that sell or provide goods and/or services to the public.

At a Parliamentary function hosted for us on 21 November by the Minister for Disability Issues, the Hon Tariana Turia, we launched our latest briefing document called “Does Your Website Shut the Door in Our Face?”. This publication draws attention to the problem of CAPTCHAs which often appear on today’s websites. This compliments our other briefing documents including one on website accessibility in general, and emphasises the human rights issues that are involved particularly for websites that sell or provide goods and/or services to the public. It basically makes the point that website owners are required by law to make reasonable efforts to ensure their websites are accessible to everyone, including people with disabilities.

Our brief 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”. We do acknowledge there will still be situations where a CAPTCHA is required, such as for security reasons, but we feel CAPTCHA is often used where it is not justified.

Accessibility of websites has been a particular focus for us this year. This is particularly important for blind and vision impaired people because, with websites becoming more and more common in today’s world, if they are accessible and work properly with the special technology we use, it means we can do such everyday things as online shopping, our banking, and read the news etc just like many other people nowadays take for granted.

New Zealand, unlike numerous other countries, does not have specific legislation to uphold the rights of disabled people to equitable access to websites and online information. Instead, New Zealanders rely on the Human Rights Act 1993. This Act requires organisations, both commercial and non-commercial, to take reasonable steps to avoid discriminating on the grounds of disability. When discrimination occurs, the organisation concerned is required to show that it would be unreasonable to avoid this happening.

We are now completing a submission to go to the Human Rights Commission that calls for a comprehensive review of website accessibility as a human rights issue. We hope this will lead to various actions including government initiatives to raise the awareness of accessibility issues by website owners and developers, expanding the Government’s own web standards, and ultimately legislation to mandate that a wide range of websites that provide goods and services to the public must be accessible. We see this as the cyberspace equivalent of access to public buildings and facilities.