I usually contact support for #accessibility issues and give the company a chance to fix it.
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I usually contact support for #accessibility issues and give the company a chance to fix it. I've now decided that if a company has an inaccessible captcha that prevents me from doing something routine like logging in or submitting a ticket, I'm just going to cancel every service I have with them and move elsewhere.
I think there are certain accessibility barriers that you can't not know about. And when you're a web developer, you can't not know that a visual-only captcha will keep out some percentage of users. Adding one to the website is an informed choice.
So when one of my hosting providers added a captcha to their login page, I didn't bother figuring out whether they had added one to their contact page as well. I solved it once, canceled everything I had with them, and used the "Reason for Cancellation" box to let them know why.
Hopefully they make better choices going forward.@simon If sighted people are not affected, they simply cannot care.
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@simon If sighted people are not affected, they simply cannot care.
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@TRodick93 @pixelate Yeah, Vultr is great. It was GreenCloud. Originally I signed up for them because they had a few locations that are hard to find elsewhere, and they're also very cheap if you find their sales. They were actually reliable enough that they powered my Denver TT Hub server for several years, but that's already been moved.
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I usually contact support for #accessibility issues and give the company a chance to fix it. I've now decided that if a company has an inaccessible captcha that prevents me from doing something routine like logging in or submitting a ticket, I'm just going to cancel every service I have with them and move elsewhere.
I think there are certain accessibility barriers that you can't not know about. And when you're a web developer, you can't not know that a visual-only captcha will keep out some percentage of users. Adding one to the website is an informed choice.
So when one of my hosting providers added a captcha to their login page, I didn't bother figuring out whether they had added one to their contact page as well. I solved it once, canceled everything I had with them, and used the "Reason for Cancellation" box to let them know why.
Hopefully they make better choices going forward.@simon Sadly, your bar for the knowledge and diligence level of web developers in 2026 is way higher than reality. And that's only partially down to AI.
A few days ago, someone suggested to me that designing a custom component to work a certain way for authors would be confusing. Even though it was the exact (and to me logical) way the equivalent HTML element has worked for decades.
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@simon Sadly, your bar for the knowledge and diligence level of web developers in 2026 is way higher than reality. And that's only partially down to AI.
A few days ago, someone suggested to me that designing a custom component to work a certain way for authors would be confusing. Even though it was the exact (and to me logical) way the equivalent HTML element has worked for decades.
@simon And that's not me disagreeing with your stance, by the way. I just wish we could trust developers to not choose such evidently inaccessible systems.
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@TRodick93 @pixelate Yeah, Vultr is great. It was GreenCloud. Originally I signed up for them because they had a few locations that are hard to find elsewhere, and they're also very cheap if you find their sales. They were actually reliable enough that they powered my Denver TT Hub server for several years, but that's already been moved.
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@TRodick93 @pixelate I've never seen another provider with that functionality either. I was able to get one server host to give me serial console access to a dedicated server, but every VPS panel i've seen only has a VNC console. TT Hub used to be on Linode, but I was having outages in their NJ datacenter every month. I've contemplated going back there, especially when Vultr's control panel was less accessible, but Vultr has been genuinely great to me. I was able to meet with their web developer over Zoom to help him work through some of the issues in the creation wizard. It's still not perfect, but I watched changes happen in real time, and they clearly actually give a damn. And they gave me (without my asking) a ton of billing credit after that. So I'm happy to keep stuff where it is for the time being.
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@simon And that's not me disagreeing with your stance, by the way. I just wish we could trust developers to not choose such evidently inaccessible systems.
@jscholes Yeah, I am fully prepared to be wrong every time I say something should be common knowledge. My point is more that the level of understanding one needs to have about screen readers to figure out why they don't work with a visual captcha is almost 0, even compared to understanding how specific native controls work. And it's hard to do any research into captcha implementation without running into some kind of discussion about he accessibility implications of using one. So it feels like the use of a visual captcha says a lot about someone's overall regard for the accessibility of their product, whereas someone who tries to reinvent a button is at least making some kind of effort. Yes, I know, the bar is in hell.
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@TRodick93 @pixelate I've never seen another provider with that functionality either. I was able to get one server host to give me serial console access to a dedicated server, but every VPS panel i've seen only has a VNC console. TT Hub used to be on Linode, but I was having outages in their NJ datacenter every month. I've contemplated going back there, especially when Vultr's control panel was less accessible, but Vultr has been genuinely great to me. I was able to meet with their web developer over Zoom to help him work through some of the issues in the creation wizard. It's still not perfect, but I watched changes happen in real time, and they clearly actually give a damn. And they gave me (without my asking) a ton of billing credit after that. So I'm happy to keep stuff where it is for the time being.
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@simon @pixelate I am running all shared CPU instances, three are 4-core, 8 GB RAM, 160 GB SSD, and one is 2-core, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SSD. Also hooking up S3-compatible object storage on a couple of my boxes using Wasabi (which I prefer over B2 as there are no egress fees whatsoever). All my servers are in the Chicago DC with my object storage in Texas, so both in the central US.
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