Shouldn't that liability be with the operators of websites that use those captchas if they're required to be blind-accessible? If they get sued, it'll apply pressure up the supply chain.
I used to feel and think this way. But recent events, and the trajectory of the internet over the last decade has changed my mind completely.
We must stop giving excuses to the massive centralization, to the enormous companies that step in and rent-seek what is supposed to be a distributed system.
The most powerful tool we could have to get a proper internet back is the simple concept of accountability. If I was a bakery and I made a cake with poison because I was specifically asked to do so by a customer, I would still be accountable for the dangerous thing I made.
Stop making excuses for these companies with basically infinite money. They are the last ones who need it. What we all need from them is accountability.
This also goes for section 230 protections. We do not need Twitters and Facebooks and Hacker Newses and other such companies that would supposedly not exist without section 230 protection. It's clear now, in retrospect, that accountability is far more important than the license to grow enormous without any responsibility for the toxicity your giant bloated corpse of a business unleashes onto the world.
Anyone making a captcha product can and should be expected to make it work for anyone. And if there is basis for lawsuit, it should be the maker of the broken thing that faces it.
Hell, sue them both. Neither entity deserves a free pass. They both had a part to play in the exclusion.
This does not really make sense, it would be perfectly fine if two products existed, a cheap inaccessible captcha and a more expensive perfectly accessible one with companies offering both of them to users.
That is not happening in what I described. A webpage could decide to offer the cheapest working captcha as a default with a "Are you using assistive technologies?" / "Do you need help?" link to a more accessible service.
I don't think that is will be common in the wild, but it is an argument against regulating captcha providers rather than websites.
If we want to regulate the captcha industry there should be a law passed specifically regulating the industry. Blindsiding the industry with judgments against them when there are no laws about it will decrease confidence in the rule of law, which will hurt the economy as businesses lose confidence in their ability to predict the future.
Rules and laws are good tools and, I understand how law works in the most superficial way but, I fail to understand normalization of ignorance of some required features with the "nobody forced us to do this, so we just didn't care".
As human beings first and programmers later, we should understand that people with disabilities exist and assistive technologies need attention.
Why, as decent human beings, don't we do something nice without the push of laws, for once?
I agree we should do nice things without the push of law. But ztjio was advocating for the push of law without following the process of creating a law, which I disagree with.
I agree. You don't sue the contractor because they built to the specification you provided.
At the same time, if Google is advertising Recaptcha as accessible and it's not really, then they need to be held accountable for that, because that has a real impact on huge swaths of the internet, and especially for sites that try to do the right thing and find out Google has screwed them.
> You don't sue the contractor because they built to the specification you provided.
In the world of licensed contracting you absolutely do. If you provide a contractor specifications that result in a code violation, they have to tell you no. If they don't tell you no then you, the non expert, are reasonable to assume what you asked for is acceptable. If they actually build the thing, they are liable for the violation of code.
The last thing we need is to hand out more excuses to evade accountability and responsibility for making the world worse.
Yeah, contractor is a bad metaphor. I started with Home Depot, but that didn't really fit either. It's more that you bought a ramp that's designed to fit over a two step rise. Was it advertised as accessible in your state/county (which will likely have specific gradient and handrail rules? If not, you should have looked. If the salesperson assured you it was, well that sucks, but I'm not sure you'll get more than your money back.
> The last thing we need is to hand out more excuses to evade accountability and responsibility for making the world worse.
I'm definitely not advocating that. I'm more advocating that you can't leave all this to someone else entirely. Even if you pay someone for a turn-key custom website and make sure it's accessible, there's no guarantee it still meets standards a year from now, just as if you pay a contractor to build a ramp for you that perfectly meets standards. Things change, and people need to pay attention to the things that matter to them to make sure they follow the law. Whether that's occasionally checking it yourself or paying someone else to do so (and thus ensuring it happens), it still needs to happen.
As sad as it is, there seems to be a CAP situation when it comes to captchas. It's accessibility, security or privacy. Choose two.
You can go the Google route and choose accessibility and security, do massive user tracking, and don't even show CAPTCHAs at all for normal users. HN users probably see a lot, because they use some anti-js or anti-tracking stuff, but normal users don't.
You can go the Cloudflare route, requiring users to solve visual challenges, sacrificing accessibility, but keeping security and privacy.
You can also implement audio CAPTCHAS, which are easy to solve for robots, get accessibility and privacy, but less security.
> You can go the Google route and choose accessibility and security
This is not the case. After just a few captchas the audio challenge will be locked off no matter what browser you use.
> and don't even show CAPTCHAs at all for normal users
You see them in firefox from the start as well as on chrome after around the 2nd or 3rd captcha, this is with the default settings + ublock origin on both browsers.
