SubscribeI understand that there are more and more spam bots popping up every day, and that their garbage infests more and more systems with useless information, but at what cost to usability do site owners sacrifice to block robots?
My friend and I were discussing an idea for a show on BlogTV, where we’d do a PIctionary/Win Lose or Draw type game called Blogonary. I go to make the account and this hits me on the registration form:
What the hell does that say? Maybe I’m just not good at reading these things, but this isn’t the first time I’ve had to go through a couple CAPTCHA images before I could register my account, and I’m a persistent ilk. What about a non-savvy web user that stumbles across some monstrosity like that and just closes the window rather than cycle through five or six images to get one they can read?
Vision impaired CAPTCHA should be a nice touch; click a little icon and hear an audible rendering of your CAPTCHA. Listen to it and put it in the little input field. Nothing could be more simple, right? Wrong. People try to clog the text to speech with nonsense so robots can’t decipher the content of the audio. The problem with that? We can’t figure it out either. It’s like trying to pick up your friend whispering on the other side of a busy mall. It’s not going to happen.
I’m sure these awful CAPTCHAS I’ve stumbled across are the far reaches on the difficult end of the spectrum, but who is saying what is too difficult? Can’t we get around this by building better authentication that the user will find intuitive?
Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps we’re past the web 2.0 craze, where users contributing content is more haphazard because of spam bots, so we just make it so damned hard for anyone to participate. Maybe we’ll go back to the era of having flashing tiling gifs as backgrounds too. Wouldn’t that be nice?
As web designers, our goal is to make using our web sites as easy as possible, let’s get back to basics, people.
