We’ve said it many times: CAPTCHA is evil and sucks and must be eliminated. So we’re pleased to learn that Telstra is planning to dump the unfriendly authentication method from its sites entirely.
Telstra’s sixth disability action plan includes two undertaking related to CAPTCHA:
- Eliminating all CAPTCHA-based verification from Telstra consumer sites. This is scheduled to be completed by 30 September 2014.
- Including accessibility requirements, including CAPTCHA, in tenders for external IT suppliers.
Both seem like sensible policies to emulate and improve site accessibility.
Comments
13 responses to “Everyone Should Copy Telstra And Get Rid Of CAPTCHA”
Did you know that re-captcha is actually digitising the world’s books for future generations – one verification at a time? It’s actually a very smart ‘two birds with one stone’ project.
Then why most of words gibberish?
Some of sentence poor!
They give a “control word” and then an image of something they don’t know.
The control word is your standard CAPTCHA stuff, but if you get that wrong then they don’t count you as having solved the unknown image.
They most common solution for the unknown image eventually is chosen as the winner, and hopefully we’ve all helped OCR get better.
Ditched CAPTCHA years ago, there are much more transparent methods of verifying a human is entering data. A form field hidden via CSS that a human can’t see but a bot will enter data into for example. Not sure why you’re giving Telstra all the credit.
That seems like a pretty clever and easy to implement system. I might steal that one 🙂
That’s actually… genius!
Not really…what happens when they teach the bot to read CSS?
Or it’s a big site like Telstra that a hacker would specifically target, in his testing he’d surely figure this out fast.
Does not work very well, coming from my experience. I use that method on my website and it worked for a while but then it started again, now I use simple arithmetic to verify a human.
Easy to circumvent. Takes a lot more effort to teach a bot to use OCR on a rubbish image and produce the correct text than to put in a couple of lines to ignore a hidden text field.
Yeah I’ve had many issues with captcha though I seen to get them if I’m drunk. That how ever poses a problem when I’m at work.
Captcha is effective in that any human trying to read those stupid wavy words will get it wrong 5 times before finally getting one thats readable. If you get it first time you must be a robot.