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

The title kind of makes it appear far less of a problem than it actually is, because according to the article, hCaptcha made multiple rude and evidence-free accusations of lying despite the author actually being blind.

Remember that from hCaptcha's point of view, by this point they've probably dealt with hundreds of other people claiming that they are blind when they really aren't, so their bots will work.

This isn't a defense, just an explanation... but it is also an explanation of why the entire idea of "we'll not give blind people a way past the CAPTCHA but just give a pass to 'real' blind people so we can pass ADA", which is that it should have been transparently obvious that this approach is completely infeasible and unscalable. 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.

This shouldn't have gotten deployed and then become a problem; it should have been a 5 minute diversion in the meeting where it was proposed to analyze it's completely infeasible and never made it to so much as the design phase, let alone the deployment phase.

If you had a system for completely accurately identifying characteristics like "who is blind" in the presence of extremely hostile attacks on the system, you'd have something far more valuable than the CAPTCHA system itself! The whole idea intrinsically depends on having a stronger solution to the problems CAPTCHAs are meant to solve than the CAPTCHA system itself provides... it's fundamentally a logically unsound idea.

What is your suggested alternative?

Audio captchas are inherently discriminatory to those with hearing issues or those that don't speak the 5 supported languages. They're also somewhat easy to solve with ASR models now. Text captchas are incredibly easy to solve with LLMs.

The only other alternative I see is some incredible tracking / surveillance machine (think an actual non-browser app that you have to run on your computer), but is that really what we want?