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

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 ...

They walked me through basic troubleshooting steps, most of which I had already tried, and in an attempt to isolate the problem and help out their technical staff, I mentioned that the call to their set cookie endpoint seemed to be returning a 401 unauthorized code in brave, looking at the javascript console. I emailed back a day or so later, requesting an unban because, y’know, I *actually* am blind, but they gave a pretty canned response of no, your account is remaining banned. I was going to reach out to Cloudflare to share my experience in an attempt to get them to drop hCaptcha, but apparently they’re using an in house system now anyway.

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