Captcha security measure stops blind people from signing petition to help visually impaired

A recent We The People petition on the White House website has run into some trouble, after a troublesome security measure is preventing the people who it affects from signing it.

On May 23, a petition was launched to encourage the United States to fight for the Treaty for the Blind in Morocco. This treaty would change international laws that prevent written materials from being printed into formats usable by the blind.

While you could imagine that many of the estimated 6.6 million blind adults in the U.S. would be behind this, the petition currently only has about 8,000 signatures, far below the 100,000 needed to be considered by the White House. The reason? According to POLITICO, The National Federation of the Blind is blaming it on Captcha.

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Captcha, a security measure that stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, is the distorted text that you often need to type before signing up for something, or placing an order on a website. It’s a security measure designed to do just what the name says: make sure you’re a human and not a computer.

This is fine if you’re someone with 20/20 vision, but for those with visual impairments, it can be a huge obstacle. And that’s what those signing the petition face on the We The People website.

“We had asked people to sign the petition and we’re getting these emails saying that people can’t,” NFB spokesman Chris Danielsen told POLITICO. “The constitution allows all of us to petition our government for a redress of grievance. It says nothing about needing to be able to see in order to do so.”

There is an option to listen to a distorted audio clip and enter the letters they hear instead, but the editor for BBC’s blog for people with disabilities says that the audio is often just as hard to interpret as the text.

“Ironically if I see an audio capture I tend not to bother with it because it’s usually such a poor experience… some of them sound like aliens talking and they put weird background noises over them. They are a bit of a joke in the blind community. I’ve spent half an hour on some and had to give up,” editor Damon Rose told BBC. You can hear a clip of the Captcha recording Rose is talking about on this BBC story.

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In response to complaints from the NFB, POLITICO reports that the White House says its web site complies with the requirement that it make websites accessible to people with disabilities, and is looking into improving the site.

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