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

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 am Googling "conoid" right now and I still can't even imagine what it's supposed to be.

The Google dictionary says it's a zoological term "approximately conical in shape".

The Wikipedia panel says "In geometry a conoid is a ruled surface, whose rulings fulfill the additional conditions: All rulings are parallel to a plane, the directrix plane. All rulings intersect a fixed line, the axis." The graphics are... nothing intuitive.

The M-W link in the search results says "a cone-shaped structure; especially : a hollow organelle shaped like a truncated cone that occurs at the anterior end of the organism".

None of this seeming relevant, I clicked on the Image tab and it's all these complicated Mathematica-style graphs of things that are very much not cones.

I see other people in the HN comments similarly have no idea.

Can you please explain what you saw on screen? What did the captcha think was a conoid...? Like, traffic cones or something?

Using the touch pad to long-press on the text "conoid" in my browser brought up the built-in dictionary definition on macOS:

> conoid | ˈkəʊnɔɪd | mainly Zoology adjective (also conoidal | kəʊˈnɔɪd(ə)l | ) approximately conical in shape.

> noun a conoid object: her hull was a conoid, tapering towards the bow.