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Sy Hoekstra

Being #blind is fun. Just encountered a visual captcha with no audio option. So I used JAWS Picture Smart to get AI to read me the text of the visual clue, which I typed in and got through. So basically I'm a human who needs a robot to prove to another robot that I am not a robot. Without my robot, the other robot would have thought I was a robot. Also I was trying to make a payment on my PAP machine, which really should in itself indicate that I am not a robot. #Disability #Disabled

66 comments
Elena Brescacin

@SyHoekstra It did solve the captcha? Maybe it depends which one, because with same feature of JAWS I tried on a site and it gave me wrong numbers. I guess in a few years we'll have robots asking us if we are robots

Sy Hoekstra

@talksina ChatGPT was off by 1 letter, but Claude got it right

Elena Brescacin

@SyHoekstra with me it got wrong - tried even with Be My AI for Windows.

Sy Hoekstra

@talksina So some robots are still smart enough to tell the difference

Lightfighter

@SyHoekstra wouldn't want your toaster making payments on your PAP machine...

adamrice

@SyHoekstra Robots are notorious deadbeats.

Sy Hoekstra

@adamrice Oh just *constantly* writing checks they can’t cash. Everybody knows it

Hot Dog Water

@SyHoekstra

I'm sorry. Absurd, the inhumanity of it.

Reminds me of the Popeye cartoon where he forgets his house key, so he climbs in a window to unlock the door, then goes out the window to enter through the door, all propersk likesk. lol

Chloe Raccoon

@GGMcBG @SyHoekstra @patterfloof Lots of it gets absurd. I got a captcha a while back where it asked me to select all the tractors. I selected the 1 tractor. It wouldn't let me proceed. Because the input data didn't know the difference between a tractor, a telehandler, and a combine harvester. But I do know the difference between them...

patter

@chloeraccoon @GGMcBG @SyHoekstra it's always American captchas, good thing I know what a sidewalk is, via cultural imperialism

Chloe Raccoon

@patterfloof @GGMcBG @SyHoekstra It would be funny to have it bring up UK fire hydrants. How many americans do you think could ID one?

villon

@SyHoekstra
I feel very much with you, as Fediverse has sensitized me to look at people with different abilities and to think about their needs.

Simon

@SyHoekstra

Futurama had the original "I am not a robot".

Which of the following would you most prefer?
A: A puppy,
B: A pretty flower from your sweetie, or
C: A large properly formatted data file?

There was also the offer a hot glue gun to fix Fry's leaky coolant which would probably give a definitive answer.

Sy Hoekstra

@spzb The correct answer is the file, but the flower would also have been acceptable

Simon

@SyHoekstra such a good episode. I may be compelled to rewatch it right now.

Sy Hoekstra

@spzb I mean that sounds like a good use of time to me

The Evil Chocolate Cookie

@SyHoekstra do you think that option might help me get my eyes cast server back up and running? I can’t use it because the hosting provider decided to use an image only OCR proof captcha with no audio option. You have to solve the darn capture to do literally anything, up to it, including starting your Dhar server.

Sy Hoekstra

@evilcookies98 That sucks… But yeah, it could. You could also take a screenshot and try any number of free options, like Be My AI. I would even try pulling it up on your computer and using Gemini live stream from your phone

The Evil Chocolate Cookie

@SyHoekstra true. Fortunately, I’ve got a jaws license so picture Mart is an option.

Jesse

@SyHoekstra And the whole point of that robot is that robots shouldn't be able to out-robot the robot, but if a robot can out-robot the robot then what's the point of the robot?

Adam

@SyHoekstra

Maybe worth naming and shaming the captcha provider and the service using it, so others know what to avoid or where to complain?

Sy Hoekstra

@adamsaidsomething That is probably worth it, but I did not catch the providers name unfortunately

aspragg

@adamsaidsomething @SyHoekstra What, and hope that the robot makers make the robot “better”, so the other robot *can’t* help the human prove to the robot that they’re not a robot? Do you want the human to not be able to make payments for their breathing rob^Wmachine? 😉

Stefan

@SyHoekstra
Hahaha, the way how you described this incident with a captcha is indeed funny to read and imagine the situation at the same in my head.

I wonder, how does your Screenreader process Emoji, what do you hear as an output?
@roblen

Sy Hoekstra

@kranzkrone @roblen There are labels for all the emojis. I don’t know if they are standardized or not, but basically it says something like “red angry face emoji” or “three red double exclamation mark emojis”

Ellane W

@SyHoekstra And that's why I've heard it's annoying for users of screen readers when people's user names have a ton of emojis after them. @kranzkrone @roblen

Sy Hoekstra

@ellane @kranzkrone @roblen True story. Really lots of emojis anywhere is annoying

Kate Hildenbrand (DE)

@SyHoekstra @ellane @kranzkrone @roblen my pet peeve are those "fonts" that are actually mathematical symbols. I immediately judge people who write their user names in those "fonts" to look cool or edgy or whatever people go for these days. I know it is mostly ignorance rather than malice...

Tarren (They/Them)

@SyHoekstra Ummmmm, yeah. I have yet to know of a robot that, er, needed help breathing.

Sy Hoekstra

@Tarrenvane Lol yes. Also, if a robot paid for my machine, who is going to complain?

Sy Hoekstra

@Beldarak The lesson to take from my story is we need to produce as many robots as possible to solve the problems caused by the other robots we have produced

Martijn Vos

@SyHoekstra

Those captchas need to die. It was a stupid idea in the first place, and now AI is better at them than we are, so they've become completely pointless.

I try to avoid most sites using them, but some sites that really don't need them, still use them. Like webshops. If you make it hard for me to spend my money, I'll spend it elsewhere. But sometimes a site you absolutely need still uses one, and then what?

Sablebadger

@SyHoekstra are you SURE you're not a robot? Not even a little bit? :)

Bellison22

@SyHoekstra you may be blind but you sure are clever

nshiell

@SyHoekstra as a guy that makes websites, this is very annoying. Well done for bypassing it with an AI though

HarmonicaPlayer

@SyHoekstra wow had no clue that picture smart was smart enough to read a captchha with no audio opption wow :)

the hatter

@SyHoekstra it was always a weird balance, when from basically day 2 of captchas we were using humans to train robots to read things that robots couldn't currently read. Given the humans read it incorrectly a lot of the time, it was never hard to get a robot to give the right answer in an acceptable number of tries.

Desdinova

@SyHoekstra Which shows that the CAPTCHA doesn't actually work for its intended purpose.

TinyGamerTris

@SyHoekstra

Woooow. Just wow. Every time I think those stupid things can't get worse, I get reminded that half the time they don't even use basic accessibility options and I get angry again.

CyberFrog

@SyHoekstra@tweesecake.social so sick of these ineffective barriers being placed around the web, and all the silly ways real people doing real stuff with their life have to work around them, instead of just being able to access information and services openly smh

secretsloth

@SyHoekstra robot verified human ✅ what a world 😅

Large Heydon Collider

@SyHoekstra To add another layer of absurdity: The CAPTCHA robot primarily exists to train robots on how to judge imagery like a human being.

MJ Ray

@heydon @SyHoekstra and another layer of absurdity: I'm a sighted human (for now) so don't have JAWS or similar set up, but atypical colour perception means I fail many visual tests mislabelled as "captcha". So a decent robot trained on those images is more likely to pass than this human! The world has lost the plot...

Nachtschattenspender

@SyHoekstra Just two entities of different tribes in need for a trained translator. :)

Gaysis
@SyHoekstra The core issue seems that Captchas were invented under the assumption that bots/AI are generally bad and have to be banned, while in the real world they are also being used as accessibility tools. We need to completely rethink the bot/AI problem.
Vysogota

@SyHoekstra the other day there was a post on hacker news with a poc of a Doom captcha. You had to kill three monsters to pass it.

What a great way to protect your site from blind people huh?

ozeng

@SyHoekstra I don’t think paying for a PAP machine is a good test. Making another machine breathe for you is totally something a robot using human training data would do.

Daughter of Rao

@SyHoekstra yeah, those captchas are... not doing what they say they're doing.
I'm using for a long time now an addon called Buster to automatically solve the google reCAPTCHAs for me.
So a robot is already solving the "I'm not a robot" for me.

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