Blind Dev article
When CAPTCHA becomes a quest again
Why anti-bot protection often breaks accessibility and what product teams can do differently.
Based on Blind Dev personal experience and source posts; verify current details before applying.
Archive publication: the results, tool limitations and plans described here reflect the time of the original text.
One of the most annoying things on the internet for me is CAPTCHAs.
I think sighted people often do not even notice how inconvenient they are. You see an image, enter the characters and move on.
For a blind person, it is quite different.
The problem is not just recognizing the text. Sometimes you first have to figure out where the image is at all.
Recently I was filling out a feedback form on Kaspersky’s website. It required a CAPTCHA.
But I could not find it with the cursor. There was a field for entering the code, then immediately the consent checkbox. Visually, the CAPTCHA was between them, but the screen reader could not find it. Not even with object navigation!
AI used to help me a lot in these situations. I could send a screenshot of the page to ChatGPT or OpenClaw and ask it to read the text in the image. It was not perfect, but it often helped.
Recently, though, they started prohibiting this. More and more often, the answer is something like: I cannot recognize a CAPTCHA because it is designed to protect against automated systems.
And that is really disheartening.
For someone else, it is a minor detail. For me, it can turn an ordinary form into a pointless struggle.
What options remain:
- Dig through the page’s code and try to find the image there.
- Try services such as anti-captcha.
- Ask someone for help.
But even that is not straightforward. Anti-captcha typically needs the CAPTCHA image itself, not a screenshot of the entire page. Getting that specific image can be a task in its own right.
CAPTCHAs never went away. For a while, AI genuinely helped me deal with them. Now that route is being closed off too.
And yes, it really annoys me. For many people, it is a detail they never notice. For me, it can leave me stuck if there is no sighted person nearby.
Yes, there is Be My Eyes. But as an extension, it also needs a specific object rather than the whole page.
And I have not even mentioned complicated CAPTCHAs that require dragging or selecting things.
I am now thinking about a more convenient way to handle this: either an anticaptcha extension or a separate tool that could crop the CAPTCHA from the page and send it for recognition. But this is not a finished solution yet, just a search for a way to make things a little easier.
#AI #CAPTCHA #ChatGPT #recognition #CityOfOpportunities2026Support
Source: original Russian post on VK. English translation.