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

I am also blind. hCaptcha is the worst. Their stupid cookie expires so I have to go through their getting an email to set the cookie almost every time I encounter one. It's a horrendous UX, especially when using different devices and browsers. I imagine others just give up instead of dealing with the crap. They shouldn't use the word accessibility when their whole service is the exact opposite.

The bots can probably solve them easier than blind people anyway, or they can outsource them to third world workers for next to nothing. E.G. Anticaptcha [0]:

> Starting from 0.5USD per 1000 images, depending on your daily spending volume

[0] https://anti-captcha.com/

Believe me, hCaptcha isn't much better even if you're not blind! They show me minuscule images which are barely distinguishable from each other. It manages to be much worse than reCaptcha, which is some achievement.

What's the best captcha regarding accessibility?

I'm not blind, but do have visibility issues. I can get by on my phone with maxed text size, etc. The pictures for hcaptcha are horrible... I keep having to zoom in and out. It's almost as bad as modals that flow off screen.

It sucks more when you work in the space and take a lot of care to usability. It's not that hard most of the time.

None.

There are no "best" version of captcha. I've worked on several large scale projects where captcha was floated and then quickly abandoned in favor of other methods like Honeypot or using other methods to weed out bots and other 3rd party agents.

If you have to use captcha the least worst are probably reCaptcha V2 and hCaptcha for accessibility.

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

i have the complete opposite experience. im not blind but i use tor. vpns and non spyware browser which is probably worse lol google captcha most of the time sends me into a loop that does not stop and always fails regardless how right i am for +3 minutes. meanwhile hcapcha lets me pass if i simply correctly fill out 1-3 captchas.

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.

Oh that makes sense, neat way of doing it. Basically adds a delay while also costing CPU resources.

I don't think there is any PoW that results in acceptable performance for the user (especially on mobile) while also making the cost for an attacker high enough to deter them.

Even renting the compute on AWS, it only costs $0.01 per minute for the equivalent of a decent desktop computer (c8g.4xlarge). While an attacker will likely either use a botnet, or hardware better suited for solving the PoW than the hardware the user is using.

Though CAPTCHAs don't really work well anymore either, since solving services are quite cheap. Recaptcha is nowadays primarily based on other factors, like IP reputation, susceptibility to google tracking, and behavioral scoring.

Most people engage with web content on relatively low powered machines. If you tune them to be tolerable on a 4 year old mid-range android device, there isn't much cost incurred on a threadripper.

First of all, why should I want them to set a cooky on my system? I don't want them to do that. Yeah, I do use session cookies. However, I shouldn't have to have a company set one on my system to get around their stupid CAPTCHA!! In other words, I shouldn't have to disclose anything to them. I could be an AI for all they care.

I'm OK with reCAPTCHA, but uh... Just not a fan of Google!! I'm an expert reCAPTCHA solver.

What were the chosen choices? Curious to know