As far as I know, companies who use it need to ask HCaptcha to enable the alternate text version. Even then, it may or may not pop up, for example to me it didn't pop up either on Discord mobile or on desktop, so right now I am not even able to log in to discord, even though I have an account I have used for years.

Specifically having to ask a company to provide an alternate solution when they are aware that there will be people who are unable to log in otherwise is just disgusting. You not only have to rely on a company (or possibly an individual) to do this, but also on HCaptcha. It is beyond ridiculous and it is certainly unacceptable. Hcaptcha is aware of this, and for years they have been telling us that there will be improvements, but they always choose the easy way out, which is, needless to say, not designed for the end user in mind. We are talking about just a Mastodon instance here, but imagine if this blocks you from accessing vital information that you wouldn't be able to otherwise. Health data, managing your passport or ID card on a government's site, hospitals, etc.

I do not speak German, but honeypots should work, as long as it is obvious to a screen reader user what does not need to be filled out or interacted with in general. For example, 'Check this if you are a spammer'. Simple solutions like entering commonly known information (like current year) are also effective.

Honeypots are great as long as the site hosting them is not targeted specifically.

This is great, thank you. I don't get it though, they have implemented HCaptcha as an emergency feature, yet they state that they are aware of the accessibility implications. So basically they are saying that yes, we know that you won't be able to sign up or verify that you are a human, but still, have it because this is an emergency.

The correct way to handle this would be to say that yes, we are aware of the accessibility implications, so we do not implement this at all, but rather look for something else, because they exist. HCaptcha can be bipassed, see https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/hcaptcha-solver-auto-capt/imgmoeegfjhhmljmphfkjeibkiffcdgl, so this is really not about finding an effective solution.

hCAPTCHA Solver: auto captcha bypass

An extension to automatically solve any type hCAPTCHA

^{chrome.google.com}

I believe the difficulty can be increased to add more work, for example FriendlyCaptcha uses 10 seconds, which is enough time to fill out a form.

None of the captcha solutions will stop spammers if they are really determined, for example a lot of spam is created by hiring humans to solve captcha challenges. I look at this similarly to software cracking, since everything can be cracked there is no point spending time and effort to create the most foolproof defense, but rather something that makes it not worth it. Similarly to captchas, the cost to value ratio is what matters I think.

So in this light, a few seconds that can be spent on creating hundreds or thousands of new accounts is quite important, especially if the difficulty goes up and more time is added for each new challenge.