Honeypot captchas and accessibility

Question

I have been looking at ways to prevent spam bots from posting, regstering and performing actions on my site.

Initially, I thought about implementing ReCAPTCHA using its API. However, I have found ReCAPTCHAs to be getting more difficult to read these days (some of the distorted letters aren't even legible!). I also found the audio option supplied for vision-impaired users to be frustrating and even harder to use.

I have been looking at other ways to prevent spam bots. The checkbox captcha and honeypot captcha are described on this site, so I won't go on and describe them.

I have ruled out a checkbox captcha because it is generated client-side using javascript. I only use Javascript for progressive enhancemet.

The honeypot captcha seems to be the best solution. However, I am interested in its accessibility with screen readers and other web browsing tools for the visually impaired, having no experience with those tools.

How good are screen readers/ visually impaired tools at parsing CSS? Do they even parse and apply css styles? Has anyone got any examples or implemented honeypot captchas that satisfies accessibility compliance?

Answer 1

The typical honeypot CAPTCHA field has a proper label: "If you are a human, do not fill in this field." or some other clear label telling the user what it is.

And, as such, a screen reader should read it just fine.

If you're looking for true usability and accessibility, however, then realize any sort of CAPTCHA is a detriment. It's putting the burden on the site user rather than site owner.

Of course, that's often a tradeoff that has to be done for pragmatic reasons.

Answer 2

There are number of screen readers around and they all do things differently. Some may work with CSS (although I do not know of one), some read in-line styles and some won't read styles at all.

For example JAWS (a very popular screen reader) only reads in-line styles in certain situations, http://www.freedomscientific.com/fs_support/BulletinView.asp?QC=1165.

Therefore you have to assume that the screen reader will see the text box and the user could get confused by it. So if you want your site to be accessible and useable then you should not use the Honeypot captcha.

Have you considered other alternatives? (Check out Can we do better than CAPTCHA? for some great suggestions and links). For example asking the users to answer a simple maths question, or do a simple task? Or better still don't have one at all.