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2014 Year in Review

2014 was surely a much busier year than expected. It started a bit slow, but sure got busy!

In the most recent blog post, the hot topic of Google’s new version of reCaptcha dubbed “No Captcha” was addressed. Although there are remaining challenges, Google’s No Captcha Shows Some Progress.

In a guest post by Jennison Asuncion, a new date for Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD) was announced. It’s now the third Thursday of May.

In the post Floated Labels Still Suck, problems and fixes are discussed for the terrible design pattern of putting input labels inside input fields.

Great progress for accessibility continues in WordPress; a podcast with two WordPress contributors, Joe Dolson (@JoeDolson) and Joseph O’Connor (@accessibleJoe), was published in September.

Web Axe author Dennis Lembree read Steve Krug’s excellent book, “Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited” and Twittered a series of accessibility-related points. The series was published in the post Tweets quoting “Don’t Make Me Think, Revisited”.

In May, I announced that Easy Chirp now provides accessible images for Tweets. This feature is badly needed and isn’t available on any other Twitter app. Unfortunately, and surprisingly, the feature is grossly underused.

In March, we posted a summary of CSUN14, the 29th Annual International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference. It was another great event; thanks again to California State University, Northridge. (Look for Dennis at CSUN15!)

On a more personal note, Web Axe author Dennis Lembree released an open-source Accessible HTML5 Video Player in September via his day job at PayPal. He recently changed jobs and is now Product Manager, Accessibility at eBay.

More from 2014:

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Google’s No Captcha Shows Some Progress

It sure was exciting when Google’s new reCaptcha was announced last week. Dubbed “No Captcha”, the goal of course is to provide a service that determines a human from a bot in order to prevent spam and abuse of online forms.

Derek Feathersone (@feather) from Simply Accessible was one of the first to report its accessibility impact in the blog post On the Accessibility of Google’s No CAPTCHA. The tone of the post is very positive, but the testing cited excludes JAWS with IE (still the most popular screen reader combination) where I found the No Captcha failed miserably. On the bright side, it passes with keyboard-only, Dragon Naturally Speaking, NVDA and the latest VoiceOver.

Two fundamental problems with No Captcha is that it requires JavaScript and it doesn’t work with touch devices.

You can try the No Captcha yourself on a test page hosted by Alastair Campbell (@alastc).

checkbox with label "I am not a robot"
Google’s “No Captcha” reCaptcha

At best, No Captcha simplifies the Captcha experience. At worst, it excludes some users even more than the previous version. Hopefully Google will fix the current issues, especially support for JAWS.

My recommendation is to continue using non-Captcha security techniques; two great articles on how to do so are Spam-free accessible forms by WebAIM and 10 Things to Check Before Using a CAPTCHA by SitePoint.

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