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Ask HN: How to help my parents and grandparents understand Google reCaptcha?
After spending almost two hours helping my mother and grandparents to configure an online account, via phone calls, I realized that Google reCaptcha is a nightmare for people who are not so invested into the tech world. They are struggling to understand which images they are supposed to select, even using prescribed glasses. The whole experience affected my mother so much that she cried when, after 2.5 hours, she was able to register her account, maybe out of happiness.
My grandparents didn't do any better. We resorted to make a video call so I could tell them which images to select, but obviously this is not a solution in the long term. They will surely face this challenge over and over again. I fear that I will not be there to help them all the time. I want to know what is a good way to teach non-tech-savvy people about this type of things.
Note #1: I understand how Google reCaptcha works. It will stop showing the image-selection challenge after some time, when the user's behavior can be detected with enough accuracy to consider them a non-artificial entity (aka. robot). But with the little amount of time that my family spend on the computer, I am sure that they will have to face the infamous Google reCaptcha for a few months.
Note #2: The problem with the images is not with the quality of the pictures, but with the fact that they don't know if the objects in the squares are part of the category requested in the challenge. For example, my grandfather asked a couple of times if a truck could be selected even though the challenge was requesting to select only buses. Road signs were the most difficult ones to solve, some of them were too small, or were spread across different images, they though that selecting the image image would be enough, but clearly it wasn't (clearly for me, not for them).
- detaro 8y agoI honestly never checked: do they still have an audio version? Maybe that's easier, even if it's still a shitty solution?
- guessmyname 8y agoThere is an audio option, but there's two problems with that: • My family doesn't speaks English, so they don't understand, • The option to change the language is not easily reachable, We just tried, in the official example [1] and this is what we get [2]. Edit: The error shown in the image about the automated queries may be explained by the fact that I have installed a VPN in their computers to protect them against unfiltered websites and generic malware. We are using "Private Internet Access" [3] and although I could explain them that changing the IP address just requires a few clicks, I can see them forgetting that and getting stuck for several minutes trying to get the audio option working. [1] https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo https://www.google.com/recaptcha/api2/demo [2] https://i.imgur.com/0kmtCsE.png https://i.imgur.com/0kmtCsE.png [3] https://www.privateinternetaccess.com https://www.privateinternetaccess.com
- detaro 8y agoI'm not convinced a VPN is that useful in the general case for normal users (i.e. no specific ISP badness or other thing to work around), so I'd consider dropping that to reduce the amount of challenges presented.
- legionof7 8y agoMaybe signing them up to Be My Eyes (https://www.bemyeyes.com/ https://www.bemyeyes.com/) could help?
- guessmyname 8y agoThank you, I will sign them up on this service and see if it helps.
- borplk 8y agoAs another person said I also haven't checked recently but I remember "accessibility" being a consideration in captcha systems even 5-10 years ago. I expect by now they should have more accessible alternative methods.
- sloaken 8y agoAs one who hates the Recaptcha stuff, I feel for your parents and grandparents. My problems are: 1) when it says signs, does it want the sign posts too? To be fair I have probably clicked the non road signs with the road signs. 2) click the images with cars ... hmmm is ther a car in that? I am not sure. Do partial cars count? I kind of prefer the old illegible text ones.