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

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

#61

Post by bityard »

Rastonbury wrote: post #14

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

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

#62

Post by croisillon »

slater wrote: post #39
ta1243 wrote: 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)

Please enter your five-digit ZIP code

did you know that the ZIP code for both Paris Texas and Paris France start with 75xxx

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

#63

Post by [deleted] »

bluGill wrote: post #20
blindgeek wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, that's a good point, and it hadn't occurred to me. For the overwhelming majority of blind people, language like "looked at" is just metaphorical. I mean, all language is symbolic anyway. The map is not the territory and the menu is not the dinner. Some of us are taught very young to use common terms like look in that kind of a metaphorical way. Partially so that we fit in and are comfortable with the rest o…

Even as a sighted person, "look at" is often metamorphic - you can interview an expert over the phone and say you looked into the subject even though the only looking was around the phone number.

[deleted]

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

#64

Post by Symbiote »

ta1243 wrote: post #22
Rastonbury wrote: post #14

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)

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.

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

#65

Post by slightwinder »

isodev wrote: post #21

Why are captchas even a thing still? If folks want to scrape something or build an automation around something, then why not let them do it? They still have to respect the system they're logging in. Not to mention the privacy perk of not exposing your visitors to some captcha service with a dozen or more data subprocessors.

> Why are captchas even a thing still?

Because it works, to some degree. It keeps away the annoying cheap bots and stupid kids. Smarter or more dedicated actors can still circumvent it, but even they are least slowed down to some degree.

But thinking about, maybe just putting a 20 second pause after which you have to push a button might be already good enough for all this. And every stupid bot avoiding it will get banned.

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

#66

Post by nraynaud »

dewey wrote: post #28
isodev wrote: post #21

Why are captchas even a thing still? If folks want to scrape something or build an automation around something, then why not let them do it? They still have to respect the system they're logging in. Not to mention the privacy perk of not exposing your visitors to some captcha service with a dozen or more data subprocessors.

Captchas are used for many things, and the reason they are still a thing is because they mostly work. Especially fingerprinting invisible captchas. Try having a login form without a captcha and you'll realize you are capturing 100s of users every day that require you to send out a "please confirm your email address" email for each of them for no good reason. > They still have to respect the system they're logging in.…

they don't work, robots have a higher speed and success rate than humans.

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

#67

Post by dewey »

isodev wrote: post #50
dewey wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Captchas are used for many things, and the reason they are still a thing is because they mostly work. Especially fingerprinting invisible captchas. Try having a login form without a captcha and you'll realize you are capturing 100s of users every day that require you to send out a "please confirm your email address" email for each of them for no good reason. > They still have to respect the system they're logging in.…

I think folks forget that we can add many of the safeguards a captchas provide as part of whatever "form serving app" is needed without torturing our visitors to prove they can count bicycles.

I think the times of the "count bicycles" type of captcha are already counted just because of the bad user experience. Now everything is about fingerprinting, as paying to get captchas solved by humans or AI is already used everywhere if it's worth it.

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

#68

Post by michaelt »

jerf wrote: post #35
michaelt wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As big as Google, Facebook, or Amazon are, they would struggle under the load of trying to create a system for determining who is "truly" blind... and that's still true if we ignore questions like exactly what "blind" is anyhow. In several countries, the government issues certificates of blindness [1] which grant access to certain extra types of support. We don't want severely vision-impaired people being forced to…

If "having a government identity" was a solution to the identity problem, it would be solved. It is not solved. That is at most the beginning of a solution to the problem. And in practice, it is little more than the beginning of the problem, as the government's definition of blindness is very unlikely to be a precise match to "has problems completing our visual CAPTCHA", and if multiple governments have standards the…

> They're international businesses with engineering teams, and a constant feed of low-level operatives who can scam governments about how blind they are if the governments leave any hole in their system.

I don't know about your country, but in my country the government is pretty keen on avoiding abuses of the benefits system. After all, a blind person gets tax breaks and cash benefits totalling about $5000/year.

So the existing system is used to dealing with financially motivated adversaries. I doubt the additional financial motivation of being able to bypass hCaptcha would mean much, in comparison.

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

#69

Post by isodev »

slightwinder wrote: post #65
isodev wrote: post #21

Why are captchas even a thing still? If folks want to scrape something or build an automation around something, then why not let them do it? They still have to respect the system they're logging in. Not to mention the privacy perk of not exposing your visitors to some captcha service with a dozen or more data subprocessors.

> Why are captchas even a thing still? Because it works, to some degree. It keeps away the annoying cheap bots and stupid kids. Smarter or more dedicated actors can still circumvent it, but even they are least slowed down to some degree. But thinking about, maybe just putting a 20 second pause after which you have to push a button might be already good enough for all this. And every stupid bot avoiding it will get ba…

Indeed… and if it's really problematic, a client-side script can run some expensive calculations as well (the same way captchas do it), to make it extra uninteresting to target unless someone is really motivated and has the budget for it.

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

#70

Post by Wowfunhappy »

dizhn wrote: post #53
Rastonbury wrote: post #14

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 routinely have problems with closeup images. To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too. Once it showed me a picture of steps nothing but steps. I think I marked like 15 boxes.

> To this day I don't know how much of the object I should be selecting? Also what is a traffic light? Is the pole part of it or not? Motorcycles seem to be hard too.

I have always assumed this was purposefully ambiguous. The right answer is whatever a majority of humans will answer when presented with the same picture.

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