Recent Deutsche Bahn accessibility issues and improvements

Ever since the COVID situation calmed down and the lockdown was a thing of the past, I started working in the fields together with our local technical consultants scattered across the country. Therefore, during the last 1.5 years, I have been traveling more than ever before, mostly relying on the services Deutsche Bahn has to offer (sometimes more, sometimes less or not accessible). In German, the word “Verschlimmbessern” stands for the intention to make things better but instead, they turn out to be even worse than before; and today I’d like to particularly talk about the accessibility of these services, some of which were “verschlimmbessert” as time went by. So let’s depart right away, doors will close automatically…

In the past, I have been posting about different improvements, as well as a few negative changes.

The assistance request form has been improved, and the outsourcing of the assistance organization to private public transport companies (see this article for further details) is a thing of the past. In addition, seat reservations through the MSZ for international routes do no longer need to be picked up from a ticket machine or the travel agency, and can easily be received by Email, under condition that you – of course – own a valid disability proof.

Unfortunately, these reservations from the MSZ are excluded of the online comfort check-in service, so you need to show the ticket to the conductor in person when he or she comes by.

This is certainly not very convenient, but something I would say I can somehow live with, and all in all, the online services of Deutsche Bahn are pretty accessible to me.

However (and that’s how the word “verschlimmbessern” came to my mind), for almost a year now, Deutsche Bahn has set up a barrier that makes it difficult or even impossible to login to your account as a blind person.

When I once tried to login to my DB account in order to book tickets, I stumbled upon a checkbox saying “I am human”. Well, that I can confirm! However, when activating the checkbox, a captcha window came up, asking me to click on all the pictures with a traffic light (obviously the tasks change every time you enter the captcha window).

Whereas the buttons for the pictures were surprisingly visible and labeled with numbers, I am not able to see the picture itself, so it is no use.

At least they offer settings in order to improve the accessibility, but when clicking on the accessibility button, they would direct me to the HCaptcha website. In order to get access to the so-called “accessibility cookie”, I need to register with my name and my Email address. This goes beyond my understanding of “data protection”, being forced to give your personal information to a 3^rd-party provider having nothing to do with Deutsche Bahn anymore, but I decided to give it a try anyway.

Finally, I found a button to set the accessibility cookie and went back to the DB website. Maybe because of the data protection settings I have set in my browser, the cookie did not do the trick.

Thus, I cannot sign into my account without sighted help at this time.

I have been in touch with Deutsche Bahn’s technical support as well as their complaints department, who both directed me back and forth to either of those departments.

Most of the phone calls were friendly and they at least tried to be as helpful as possible trying to find a solution, whereas certain technical support agents I talked to never seemed to have heard about the word “accessibility” at all, so I gave them a basic lesson on how blind and visually impaired people can work with computers, smartphones or tablets. However, their only suggestion they had was to ask a sighted person of trust for help, and they cannot change their login system for security reasons.

As I realized that phone calls wouldn’t get me any further, I have been in Email contact with DB to follow up on my request more easily.

Whereas their replies (mostly coming down to “We use captchas for security reasons, and we cannot change our login-system”) were also not very helpful in first place, I COULD notice some slight changes from time to time, although they for some reason didn’t last very long. It actually seemed like, at least for some time periods, the screen reader actually overrode the captchas, and when checking the human-verification checkbox, I got verified automatically; so I assume that the captcha system could recognize when a screen reader was active.

However, as I already mentioned earlier, it always reverted back to the not accessible verification system, no matter whether a screen reader was active or not.

When I brought up the issue to the DB support again and again, I sometimes had the feeling as if they never read through the Email completely, and just gave me some random suggestions like “ask your internet provider for help solving the captchas” or “there are some accessibility settings to overcome the captcha” (exactly what I already tried and reported clearly that this damn cookie does not work).

A couple of months later (up until now), it is at least possible again to login without a captcha, and instead enable a 2-factor-authentification through your phone with a TAN received via SMS. However, this only seems to work fine when you are already logged in but you want to access certain areas that require a password authentication. Users who are not yet logged in on unknown devices, for instance, still need to figure out how to deal with the captcha and additionally get an SMS if the 2-factor-authentification is active. Great! How about another security enforcement? You can’t be safe enough! But seriously, we are talking about the website of Deutsche Bahn to book tickets, subscriptions, check your status, etc.

My point is that we can sign in to our online-banking, PayPal, and a lot of different shopping and government websites way easier, and can even verify in an accessible way that it is actually us trying to access our account. Why the hell does Deutsche Bahn cling so hard on their one and only captcha system which so far brings more issues than it helps keeping bots outside?

Fun-fact: I even heard of sighted users reporting that they have issues solving the captcha properly because it’s hard to understand the tasks, as well as the pictures shown to click on.

Update from the future

A few months have passed now, and a couple of things happened in between.

First off, I received an Email of Deutsche Bahn in which they admitted and excused themselves that the current way to log in as a blind user is certainly not optimal, and they are working on a solution and asked me to stay patient, as long as they are trying to find a better solution. This certainly doesn’t eliminate the problem in first place, but at least they took the time to read through my entire Email and replied accordingly.

The next thing that happened is that, for at least a few months now, I was no longer confronted with a stupid captcha, and instead straight away receive an SMS with a verification code in order to log in.

Last, but not least, the DB-Navigator app received an update and optimized in many different ways, one of which is the ability to add a separate seat reservation to your ticket in order to use the comfort check-in function on most of the long-distance trains.

It also conveniently comes up with alternative connections giving you the chance to overwrite your original travel plan, so you get informed about the most up-to-date travel information, should your connection change.

Another major improvement could be the implementation of the assistance form into the regular booking process, but perhaps this would be a bit too much at a time.

I was once checking the Amtrak website to look for train connections in the US, and I was amazed about how well train tickets as well as the assistance could all be booked all together in one process. But I’m afraid for Deutsche Bahn it is still a longer way to get there eventually.