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I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

michaels.world

211–220 of 277 posts

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#211
post #22

Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Another recent one sticks out where they asked me to pick a shape as the same number of conoids on screen. If you ask people on a street what a conoids I bet a significant amount will give you blank looks Also at least now I know some people call those markings crosswalks

Sorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk" Did you mean to say > not everyone lives in the USA Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, yellow taxis, yellow buses (Obviously I do, because of American cultural imperialism through things like Captchas which mean the world has to understand American cultural touchstones)

Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant

Even within the United States, fire hydrants vary greatly from city to city.

I remember the first time I moved to a city that had those little squatty dark blue ones. I thought they were water main access points.

It's interesting to see so many people on HN assessing that captchas are biased toward American culture. Very frequently I get captchas that include things I don't know, and when I look them up, they turn out to be Indian in origin.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#212
post #44
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please enter your five-digit ZIP code

90210 (Cue theme music in mind's ear)

That’s my zip code too, along with millions of others who live outside the US. Haven’t needed to use it for a while.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#213
Please just let my link some kind of government-backed ID to an email account and then clients can ask "hey government, is this email account a real human being in your country"? And government can say "yes" and they can go forward knowing that if I turn out to be a bot and they ban me it will be a huge pain in my ass because I've got to go through government enrollment process again.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#214
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry I live in the west, what's a "crosswalk" Did you mean to say > not everyone lives in the USA Other things I don't have a clue about - a fire hydrant, yellow taxis, yellow buses (Obviously I do, because of American cultural imperialism through things like Captchas which mean the world has to understand American cultural touchstones)

Maybe the standard international signs are more easily recognised by machines anyway, but if not it will be interesting when Google and others start needing Captcha help. Americans will need to learn what speed limit, parking prohibition and pedestrian crossing signs look like in the rest of the world, as well as realizing buses and taxis come in more colours.

Americans will need to learn what speed limit, parking prohibition and pedestrian crossing signs look like in the rest of the world

If you think this is a binary America/Rest of the World problem, then you haven't visited very much of the "rest of the world" and noticed that every place is full of variations.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#215
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have lived in the West my whole life, and am reasonably well educated, and have never heard the word conoids in my life.

Sure, but you can imagine pretty easily what a ‘conoid’ would be, right? ‘Sphereoid’ would be something sphere-like, ‘mongoloid’ is something mongol-like, ‘freakazoid’ is something freaky… it’s pretty clear from context that ‘conoid’ means ‘like a cone’ isn’t it?

But is it a geometrical cone, a conifer tree like thing, a psuedo-control device, or what.

I consider my self pretty literate (I was assessed as reading at a college level by the 4th grade), and I've never heard that word.

More importantly, they can look absolutely nothing like cones.

Would you identify this as "cone like" if it wasn't for the URL? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conoid#/media/File:Pluecker-co...

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I distinctly remember a captcha which asked me to identify fire hydrants. Some of the pictures were hydrants, while others were standpipes. These are different things, and I answered accordingly. The service refused to acknowledge my humanity until I relented that a standpipe was a hydrant. If at some future date any of us burn to death due to an automated fire truck that misbehaved due to this, we’ll know why.

Yup - I recognize this problem. I am a motorcyclist and I frequently have to grit my teeth and misidentify scooters as motorcycles if I want to get past captcha. For non-bikers, a scooter has an automated gearbox and small wheels etc. Think vespa. In the UK at least they are generally a different category of license, although that's because of the size of a standard scooter engine.

Except scooters are literally motorcycles? From Wikipedia:

> A scooter (motor scooter) is a motorcycle with an underbone or step-through frame, ....

Scooters are often legally motorcycles as well. For example, I had to get a motorcycle endorsement on my license for a scooter I owned, because the engine displacement was too large for the extremely restrictive "moped" category in my state.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#217

Some captchas are getting pretty discriminatory, not everyone lives in the West and can identify the objects they are asking you to. Another recent one sticks out where they asked me to pick a shape as the same number of conoids on screen. If you ask people on a street what a conoids I bet a significant amount will give you blank looks Also at least now I know some people call those markings crosswalks

I can't be the only person who's been checking as many wrong answers as I can get away with for the last decade, and I'd be complimented by my conoid-questioning brethren. Captcha seems like it's fully entered a "bear proof garbage can" phase I don't see it escaping.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#218
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the best captcha regarding accessibility?

Brave PoW captcha maybe? Because it requires no input/interaction from the user.

I don't understand why POW solutions aren't more popular.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#219
post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave PoW captcha maybe? Because it requires no input/interaction from the user.

I don't understand why POW solutions aren't more popular.

I'd never heard of them before getting them while using Brave search sometimes, I'm not sure I entirely understand how they work and differentiate between a bot and human.

Re: I was banned from the hCaptcha accessibility account for not being blind (2023)

#220
post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why POW solutions aren't more popular.

I'd never heard of them before getting them while using Brave search sometimes, I'm not sure I entirely understand how they work and differentiate between a bot and human.

They don't differentiate. They just make it too expensive to be worth paying for the resources required to carry out a spam attack at any meaningful scale.
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