Also known as: why you shouldn't trust a company who makes their product intensionally inaccessible with allowing you an accessibility workaround Update: I've been informed that hCaptcha now has a text captcha option. The bulk of this blog post still stands. Thanks to D Hamlin for the ...
How would they even deem to determine that one is not blind over the internet?
It seems they decided that based on the author saying that they “looked at the browser console” so either based on using the word “looked” or they deemed using the browser console to be sketchy and enough to disqualify the author, either way pretty shitty.
Some people are legally blind as well. CAPCHAs are often either small sometimes blurry pictures or a deliberately blurry font. Someone with dyslexia may also struggle to read some CAPCHAs.
So banning someone over this is just reprehensible and ignorant unless there is truly evidence that they were trying to build a bot or otherwise maliciously use the site. :(
I’m pretty sure blind people still use the word “looked” in that context when communicating online.
I didn’t think I implied otherwise, I did say it was shitty of them because it makes no sense to assume someone isn’t blind just because of their word choice. I’m just guessing at what their reasoning is.
It feels, to me, like they thought the author was trying to get an accessibility cookie for a bot.
Could be that too, but it would have to be still based on either the author using the word “looked” or mentioning using the browser console because that’s the only information they could be going off of, which is all I was saying.
I suspect they latched onto the 401 return code and made no determination on whether the author is or isn’t blind.
“It sounds like they want to use this for a bot - they can’t be blind!”
@Anticorp @BakedCatboy Hey I wonder what happens if I mention this thing? Nothing good, probably. The fediverse is weird.