reCAPTCHA unfairly denies access to disabled users by selectively blocking the audio challenge #418
Description
I use reCAPTCHA's audio challenge due to vision issues. Because of this, reCAPTCHA almost always denies access to me and suggests I am a bot, when I am most definitely a human.
If I manage to struggle through [many] visual challenges, I am finally granted access, which proves that Google judges audio challenges as being less secure than visual ones, and therefore is actively discriminating against visually disabled people.
This is incredibly frustrating and effectively blocks disabled people from a huge portion of the Web.
The W3C has been discussing this issue for some time and I will quote from their own internal issue tracker about this problem:
From w3c/captcha-accessibility#28
The most prominent issue is that reCAPTCHA selectively blocks the audio challenge, while the visual challenge remains available for solving. This practice discriminates against people with visual disabilities, and prevents them from getting access to services and information on the web.
The reCAPTCHA Google Group and other forums have several threads about people with disabilities looking for a solution because of the blocked audio challenge, this is one of them: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/recaptcha/5TFQ2c4phPU/discussion
https://groups.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!searchin/recaptcha/audio%7Csort:date
https://www.google.com/search?q=%22audio%22+%22captcha%22+OR+%22recaptcha%22+%22automated+queries%22People are encountered with this message when they try to access the audio challenge: Your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
This happens because the reCAPTCHA algorithm erronously flags people as bots, and it simply blocks access to the audio challenge instead of offering a challenge that is harder to solve.
The blocking of the reCAPTCHA audio challenge is a regular occurence while browsing the web from residential IP addresses. People have reported some level of success in accessing the audio challenge by switching to Chrome and staying always logged into their Google accounts.
The reCAPTCHA service is also hostile to users connecting from VPNs or anonymizing services such as Tor. The audio challenge is almost always blocked when using Tor, and the visual challenge may be blocked as well, or serves several challenges in a row and refuses to accept correct solutions.
Because of the dominance of the reCAPTCHA service, people seeking privacy are effectively prevented from accessing large portions of the web.