I’m sorry if this is just me, but last time I checked I had pretty good color vision, I wear glasses but otherwise do occasional advanced visual work, and so far I guess aging hasn’t had the biggest impact on my sight yet:

But yet, I needed around five tries to get through the leminal space account signup captcha. Not only can I barely make out anything in many of the images, some I didn’t even attempt to solve, but for those that I do it still failed me. I have a feeling it likes to use letters where the capitalization is ambiguous, but then requires strict capitalization, or letter o vs number 0 or something like that.

This seems like a barrier that might be a problem for some people, given I assume a huge amount of the population has significantly worse eyesight than me, even though mine isn’t perfect.

Or it’s just me! But I wanted to bring it up in case it’s not.

  • chrisbitMAEnglish
    2·
    4 months ago

    Yes, you’re probably right. The captcha difficulty was changed to ‘hard’ maybe a year ago due to a lot of spam bot activity. I have set it back to medium for now and will see how we fare. It should provide a lot more consistent contrast in the challenge, but might not help much with ambiguity of letters (the captcha library might not be the best implementation).

    • ell1eOPEnglish
      1·
      4 months ago

      Perhaps some answer and response captcha as an additional test might work, if lemmy supports that? Something asking a community-specific question, like asking for the name of the meta community that’s probably easy to look up for a human that is actually interested in how this place works, but which a bot can’t easily get from a web search.

      • chrisbitMAEnglish
        2·
        4 months ago

        I don’t believe there’s any support for that currently. There’s just the one captcha system that’s tied in with the backend.

  • AnuttaraEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    ugh, same. those captchas are brutal. like, i get protecting the space, but when i’m guessing if that’s a 1 or a lowercase L for the third time, it stops feeling like security and starts feeling like a hazing ritual. and you’re right, if we’re struggling, what’s it like for folks with actual vision issues?