Background
EU CAPTCHA is a maintained, secure, user friendly and multilingual solution to thwart spam and automatic submission or extraction of data. It features two styles of CAPTCHA (alphanumeric/audio and rotational) and is available in all EU languages.
EU CAPTCHA could be beneficial for your applications or services when:
- You already have a CAPTCHA-type solution in use, but…
- You feel it is hard to maintain
- It is not available in all official EU languages
- Users complain about the difficulty of the CAPTCHA challenges
- It is not optimised for disabled (e.g. blind) users
- It is not secure on its own
- The cost of your current CAPTCHA provider is too high
- You are coping with a high amount of spam during account registrations
- You have identified (the risk of) bots that use your application or service
A CAPTCHA is an essential component of information systems dealing specifically with human users, such as citizens. EU CAPTCHA allows you to make a request to the included REST API using the desired language. The user can select the preferred language from a drop-down list, or the developer pre-configures or automates this during deployment.
Rules
EU CAPTCHA is an optional tool and works as a Commission-maintained solution in the form of a managed service.
Procedure
Reach out to DIGIT-EU-CAPTCHA@ec.europa.eu and provide them with some basic information about your client application, the process in which EU CAPTCHA would be used, whether you are currently using another CAPTCHA solution. They will then get in touch with you to organise a short meeting to guide you further through the onboarding process.
Accessibility
The alphanumeric CAPTCHA type is the preferred option to maximise accessibility. EU CAPTCHA supports both textual CAPTCHAs (with optional case sensitivity), as well as CAPTCHAs for users with visual impairments. The images that contain the textual CAPTCHA combination only use font colour combinations that minimise complications for users with colour blindness (red-green and blue-yellow). Moreover, EU CAPTCHA has support for spoken audio CAPTCHAs for all official languages from the European Union. (Note that the spoken CAPTCHAs do not support checks for upper- or lower-case letters during validation.)
Related links
EU CAPTCHA on Reusable Solution Platform
Contact and support
Need further assistance on this topic? Please contact the team in charge of Europa Domain Management (EU Login required).