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.<p>My grandparents didn&#x27;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.<p>Note #1: I understand how Google reCaptcha works. It will stop showing the image-selection challenge after some time, when the user&#x27;s behavior can be detected with enough accuracy to consider them a non-artificial entity <i>(aka. robot)</i>. 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.<p>Note #2: The problem with the images is not with the quality of the pictures, but with the fact that they don&#x27;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&#x27;t <i>(clearly for me, not for them)</i>.