Re last: Please please please, don't use #HCaptcha! We blind people call it HateCaptcha, and it's for a reason. Their accessibility so-called innovative technology is simply broken and doesn't work reliably. You can't imagine how much time I spent fighting with this so-called accessibility cookie. Please don't use it, for goodness sake. #MastoAdmin
Please read this account from a blind user who could not/can not solve hCaptcha, even with their supposed "accessibility cookie".
Though you shouldn't have to in the first place, please consider turning off open registrations to your instance until this spam wave is dealt with. Open registrations with hCaptcha, may be shutting off access to a not-small subset of potential users.
I know that the mastodon team are suggesting you turn on #hCaptcha for signups to your instance, to combat the spam wave provided by a rudimentary script that doesn't have the smarts to get around it.
I vaguely remember, however, that people have previously raised #accessibility concerns about it. Does anyone have any experience with the accessibility or lack there of, of signing up to instances that use this feature?
If it is indeed inaccessible, I don't consider this to be a reasonable solution.
@james I tried just yesterday to register an account on a site that uses HCaptcha. I use a screen reader on Windows and Firefox as my browser. It was completely unusable. It asked me for an 'accessibility cookie' that requires to give them a 'real email' address, refusing to accept my Firefox Relay alias. After caving in and giving them an address that i had given them a few years back and getting my accessibility cookie, the bloody captcha refused to recognise the cookie. Checking their support pages and tinkering with Firefox settings, none of which worked, I gave up and had to wait for a housemate to arrive after her work to help me solve the captcha.