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

Accessibility failure and “too smart to be blind” ban

• Commenters stress the core issue is not just a ban, but repeated, baseless accusations that a blind user was faking disability, effectively locking them out of many sites.
• Several infer support staff may have misinterpreted language like “looking at the JS console” as proof of sight, revealing ignorance about how blind people talk and work.
• Blind commenters report similar experiences: if they’re competent in technical or “unexpected” contexts, people assume they can’t be blind.

Language, blindness, and inclusion debates

• Blind participants note they routinely use visual verbs (“see”, “look”) metaphorically and are sometimes patronized for it.
• Some argue neutral verbs like “observe” might be more inclusive; others say alleged “non‑inclusive” language is a non-issue compared to real barriers (housing, web inaccessibility, physical environment).

Can you (or should you) verify who is “really blind”?

• Many argue any scheme to whitelist “real blind users” is inherently unscalable and logically flawed; if you could reliably do that under attack, you’d have solved a harder problem than CAPTCHA itself.
• Suggestions include using government blindness certificates or ID flags, but critics raise privacy, abuse, legal (e.g., ADA) and global-standards problems.
• Some disabled users say they’ll accept proof of blindness for bus passes but would refuse to provide medical proof just to access websites.

CAPTCHAs’ effectiveness and user-hostility

• Broad consensus: image CAPTCHAs are frustrating, ambiguous, and culturally biased (US-centric objects, exotic terms like “conoid”), and often unusable for low-vision or blind users.
• Audio CAPTCHAs help some but exclude non‑English speakers and people with hearing issues, and are increasingly solvable by bots.
• Many say CAPTCHAs are already cheaply bypassed via solving services and AI, yet still harm legitimate users. Others counter that even partial friction usefully filters low-effort abuse.

Alternatives and the future of anti-abuse

• Proposed alternatives: honeypots, rate limiting, simple questions, proof‑of‑work, small payments/micropayments, reputation systems, and charging for accounts.
• More radical ideas (device attestation, Web Environment Integrity, strong identity, government-backed IDs, zero‑knowledge proofs) are debated as likely to centralize power, erode anonymity, and close the web.

Legal and ethical angles

• Several suggest ADA or similar disability laws may apply, calling this an “open‑and‑shut” case; others mention GDPR rights to correct incorrect data.
• Some see providers as morally bankrupt but economically incentivized to tolerate collateral damage from anti-abuse triage until reputational or legal risk rises.