5 ms·

So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so w

So I'm member of a a religious (yogic) organisation and we have our own little chanting on Saturdays. When Covid broke out this obviously became impossible so we decided to have our meetings on Zoom instead. Now we have one woman in our group with some intellectual disability, a wonderful, sweet woman with the kindest heart in the world. Being 100% computer illiterate, she still decided to buy a tablet so she could follow the meetings on Zoom from her home. It fell to me to explain to her the whole process of opening a mail (she didn't know what an inbox was), clicking the Zoom link, clicking yes etc.. every little detail I had to explain repeatedly. It was a challenge but we slodged through the whole thing and she stayed positive and courageous throughout. Imagine how mortified I was when we reached the last steps and I had to explain to her 'and NOW.. after all that... you have to click on all the tiles with traffic lights'. She looked at me and asked with childlike innocence and wonder "but WHY do I have to click all the tiles that contain a traffic light?" I could not reasonably answer that question but I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier"

mwcampbell 5y ago
> Being 100% computer illiterate I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online. > I could not reasonably answer that question I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this: When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights. > I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier" What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  Not OP obviously, but I’ve seen superficially similar cases. It is hard to put in words, but some people just wouldn’t need to be online/on smartphones if it wasn’t for the pandemic, and they wouldn’t have any specific issue in their day to day life. Perhaps drawing a parallel with social networks could help: when such a huge portion of the population is on facebook properties, it could look crazy to not have a facebook account. Perhaps there wasn’t enough help to explain how it works ? But we understand not dealing with facebook has upsides, and while it creates hurdles, they can be worked around. We wouldn’t push someone to go on facebook if they had no need to. Obviously we are talking about exceptional cases, but if they were happy as they were, it could be worth keeping it that way if they don’t have an appetite for changing.
  - mwcampbell 5y ago
    > but some people just wouldn’t need to be online/on smartphones if it wasn’t for the pandemic, and they wouldn’t have any specific issue in their day to day life. But now the pandemic has happened, being online is more important than ever, and there's probably no going back. I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind. I know that pessimism and cynicism about the Internet are fashionable these days. But we're still here, discussing things online. If we're not willing to throw that away ourselves, then maybe we need to give those people more of a chance to decide for themselves if it's worthwhile.
    - makeitdouble 5y ago
      > I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind My interest is on what you see as actions related to that. We're a community mostly on the building the web side, bearing at least some responsibility of what "being online" means today. Your describing them as left behind makes me think you see the current web as the way forward, but I don't know if it's a fair assumption on your position. Arguably I see their lack of using online tools up to this point as a failure of those tools to provide enough value for the hassle, and the issues would be less to bring this people along than to come up with ways to bridge their world and ours. We often talk of digital litteracy as if it was an unavoidable skill, but I kind think it's like positing that Amazonia tribes have to learn english. It could be better for them, but we could also have adaptation layers that make it work for them even if they stay in their culture and lifestyle.
thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago
After years and years of captchas I still have no idea if I’m supposed to select all the poles for the traffic lights as well.
- BoorishBears 5y ago
  Those are signal/traffic/light poles: https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/lighting/signal-poles https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/lighting/signal-poles https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/traffic-poles/ https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/...
- Freak_NL 5y ago
  Should I click every tile that has a little bit of traffic light in it? Even with just the lamp housing that often means nearly all tiles. Somehow it doesn't seem to matter; it just works. Or not, and then I have no idea why. Captcha bonus level: try solving one of these from a public VPN.
  - NieDzejkob 5y ago
    Perhaps that's on purpose? If a tile is being selected only sometimes, you can infer things from that.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Yeah, it's extra frustrating that you never know when clicking a tile that contains just a tiny bit of traffic light, whether the algorithm on the other side will see it too.
  - xaedes 5y ago
    I think it is best to click the tile even if it only has a small part of the "object" in it. Other instances may have the same image but the grid is offset by a few pixels. At one point the tile does not contain the object at all and won't get any clicks. That way they could determine boundaries with higher resolution than the grid cell size.
- mongol 5y ago
bamboozled 5y ago
I could not reasonably answer that question but I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier" This is a great and wise insight !
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Unfortunately, yes it is. It's a sad state of the computer industry that these technological marvels that once filled everyone with admiration and joy has been reduced to that.
mlang23 5y ago
And there are many stories like this. When CAPTCHA started to be widespread, a lot of my blind friends (including me) suddenly were blocked from using parts of the Internet. We had to find sighted help to solve just a captcha, while everything else basically worked to be done independently. You can not imagine how much sorrow and self-pity CAPTCHAs have generated. I hope the person(s) who willingly allowed this trend to happen will be hit by karma with full force.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  I'm not a believer in godly stuff, but i'm sure Satan has dedicated an entire new level of hell to solving infinite CAPTCHAs loops for those who ever thought it would be a good idea to impose that on other people.
- caslon 5y ago
  reCAPTCHA (Google's CAPTCHA) has been accessible to the blind for nearly the entirety of its existence if not the entirety outright.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Yeah, if your browser supports this and that, otherwise not. No audio? Bad luck. No JS? Bad luck. Also, i'm assuming, maybe wrongfully so, that Google would make accessible CAPTCHAs harder to pass, with the logic that sound-based CAPTCHAs are much easier to break for a bot. All in all, reCAPTCHA (and other modern CAPTCHAs like hCaptcha) are a usability/accessibility disaster. It should be a crime to enable that on a service to restrict access to your peers.
    - caslon 5y ago
      Browsers have been free for longer than reCAPTCHA has existed, and browsers with audio and JS have been free for longer, too. I don't like JavaScript, and I block reCAPTCHA, but it's ludicrous to pretend that Google hasn't made it as accessible as possible. There are a lot of things wrong with Google, but accessibility is one thing they're reasonably good at, and making up things to trash reCAPTCHA seems dishonest. Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy. Significantly easier than the visual one.

mwcampbell 5y ago

> Being 100% computer illiterate I wonder how much of that was due to the impairment itself, and how much was due to people underestimating her or not being willing to work with her to get her online. > I could not reasonably answer that question I can appreciate that it would have been challenging to come up with an explanation on the spot, while trying to talk her through joining the meeting. Having spent several minutes thinking about this from the safe distance of an asynchronous discussion after the fact, the best I can come up with is this: When you join a Zoom meeting, your tablet makes a call to Zoom over the Internet. But Zoom doesn't know for sure that the call is coming from an actual person trying to join the meeting. Have you ever gotten a phone call from a stranger, only to find out that the call is actually from a computer playing a recording, trying to sell you something? But if you assumed all calls from strangers were like that, you might also miss important calls from real people. It's kind of like that for Zoom as well. There are all sorts of nasty programs out there on the Internet, trying to make calls to Zoom. They might be trying to snoop on people's meetings, bombard people with advertisements, or just overload Zoom. Zoom needs to keep those programs out, so it can focus on serving people like you that are actually attending meetings. Now, when you get a call from a computer, you can tell pretty easily that it's a computer, because so far, computers aren't very good at having a conversation with a person. But Zoom is a computer program, and it's not smart enough to tell whether you're a real person without asking you to do something annoying like clicking all of the tiles with traffic lights. > I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier" What actually happened? Did she make it into the meeting? Do you know if she continued to use the tablet for other things? I hope so. I know the Internet can be frustrating, but I think it would have been a mistake to conclude that it wouldn't make her any happier. After all, it has helped us stay connected through the pandemic, right? I hope she got to participate in that.

makeitdouble 5y ago
Not OP obviously, but I’ve seen superficially similar cases. It is hard to put in words, but some people just wouldn’t need to be online/on smartphones if it wasn’t for the pandemic, and they wouldn’t have any specific issue in their day to day life. Perhaps drawing a parallel with social networks could help: when such a huge portion of the population is on facebook properties, it could look crazy to not have a facebook account. Perhaps there wasn’t enough help to explain how it works ? But we understand not dealing with facebook has upsides, and while it creates hurdles, they can be worked around. We wouldn’t push someone to go on facebook if they had no need to. Obviously we are talking about exceptional cases, but if they were happy as they were, it could be worth keeping it that way if they don’t have an appetite for changing.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  > but some people just wouldn’t need to be online/on smartphones if it wasn’t for the pandemic, and they wouldn’t have any specific issue in their day to day life. But now the pandemic has happened, being online is more important than ever, and there's probably no going back. I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind. I know that pessimism and cynicism about the Internet are fashionable these days. But we're still here, discussing things online. If we're not willing to throw that away ourselves, then maybe we need to give those people more of a chance to decide for themselves if it's worthwhile.
  - makeitdouble 5y ago
    > I find it unacceptable to leave some people behind My interest is on what you see as actions related to that. We're a community mostly on the building the web side, bearing at least some responsibility of what "being online" means today. Your describing them as left behind makes me think you see the current web as the way forward, but I don't know if it's a fair assumption on your position. Arguably I see their lack of using online tools up to this point as a failure of those tools to provide enough value for the hassle, and the issues would be less to bring this people along than to come up with ways to bridge their world and ours. We often talk of digital litteracy as if it was an unavoidable skill, but I kind think it's like positing that Amazonia tribes have to learn english. It could be better for them, but we could also have adaptation layers that make it work for them even if they stay in their culture and lifestyle.

thrwn_frthr_awy 5y ago

After years and years of captchas I still have no idea if I’m supposed to select all the poles for the traffic lights as well.

BoorishBears 5y ago
Those are signal/traffic/light poles: https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/lighting/signal-poles https://www.nycstreetdesign.info/lighting/signal-poles https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/traffic-poles/ https://www.mainstreetmaterials.com/lighting-and-electrical/...
Freak_NL 5y ago
Should I click every tile that has a little bit of traffic light in it? Even with just the lamp housing that often means nearly all tiles. Somehow it doesn't seem to matter; it just works. Or not, and then I have no idea why. Captcha bonus level: try solving one of these from a public VPN.
- NieDzejkob 5y ago
  Perhaps that's on purpose? If a tile is being selected only sometimes, you can infer things from that.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Yeah, it's extra frustrating that you never know when clicking a tile that contains just a tiny bit of traffic light, whether the algorithm on the other side will see it too.
- xaedes 5y ago
  I think it is best to click the tile even if it only has a small part of the "object" in it. Other instances may have the same image but the grid is offset by a few pixels. At one point the tile does not contain the object at all and won't get any clicks. That way they could determine boundaries with higher resolution than the grid cell size.
mongol 5y ago

bamboozled 5y ago

I could not reasonably answer that question but I came close to saying "dear Kristine, throw this tablet in the garbage, none of this is going to make you happier" This is a great and wise insight !

southerntofu 5y ago
Unfortunately, yes it is. It's a sad state of the computer industry that these technological marvels that once filled everyone with admiration and joy has been reduced to that.

mlang23 5y ago

And there are many stories like this. When CAPTCHA started to be widespread, a lot of my blind friends (including me) suddenly were blocked from using parts of the Internet. We had to find sighted help to solve just a captcha, while everything else basically worked to be done independently. You can not imagine how much sorrow and self-pity CAPTCHAs have generated. I hope the person(s) who willingly allowed this trend to happen will be hit by karma with full force.

southerntofu 5y ago
I'm not a believer in godly stuff, but i'm sure Satan has dedicated an entire new level of hell to solving infinite CAPTCHAs loops for those who ever thought it would be a good idea to impose that on other people.
caslon 5y ago
reCAPTCHA (Google's CAPTCHA) has been accessible to the blind for nearly the entirety of its existence if not the entirety outright.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Yeah, if your browser supports this and that, otherwise not. No audio? Bad luck. No JS? Bad luck. Also, i'm assuming, maybe wrongfully so, that Google would make accessible CAPTCHAs harder to pass, with the logic that sound-based CAPTCHAs are much easier to break for a bot. All in all, reCAPTCHA (and other modern CAPTCHAs like hCaptcha) are a usability/accessibility disaster. It should be a crime to enable that on a service to restrict access to your peers.
  - caslon 5y ago
    Browsers have been free for longer than reCAPTCHA has existed, and browsers with audio and JS have been free for longer, too. I don't like JavaScript, and I block reCAPTCHA, but it's ludicrous to pretend that Google hasn't made it as accessible as possible. There are a lot of things wrong with Google, but accessibility is one thing they're reasonably good at, and making up things to trash reCAPTCHA seems dishonest. Audio reCAPTCHA is super easy. Significantly easier than the visual one.