Dreamwidth, Captcha shit, accessibility fail (EDIT: It's a Mastodon issue as well) 

EDIT: See Satsuma's post downthread, it's a Mastodon issue too! glitch.cat.family/@Satsuma/112 I still say DW's decision to use Captcha for these situations is ableist and wrongheaded, but it's Mastodon turning its preview box link into essentially spamware that directly triggered the issue.

Is it some kind of bug with #Dreamwidth that I had to solve a pretty intense Captcha every time I click on a fedi link to a Dreamwidth post? Even though I'm logged in on the DW site? The message was that I'd been selected semi-randomly, whatever that means, but I was asked three times in a row when I tried clicking on the link.

Not only was it an annoyance, I can't figure out how visually impaired users are supposed to solve this and access the post at all. When my third click gave me the Captcha prompt I ended up simply browsing to the post on a different tab, which worked fine.

If this keeps up, users may want to reconsider posting Dreamwidth links as an accessible and open way to share their posts on other platforms. Even sighted users may give up from the time-consuming annoyance of being asked to pattern-match on blurry photographs, and it's totally closed off to blind users.

Dreamwidth, Captcha shit, accessibility fail 

@ljwrites That's super weird. O_o

Just tried links to two different posts, using both Firefox (logged in) and Chrome (not logged in). Didn't get captchas from either. Not sure why DW is picking on you and/or writeout.ink. :/

Dreamwidth, Captcha shit, accessibility fail 

@rowyn I just tried it on mobile and there's no captcha! Looks like getting asked every time is something that happens in some super specific circumstances. Still, even the occasional and random use of captcha can make a post inaccessible. I'll have to tell the DW maintainers about this.

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Dreamwidth, Captcha shit, accessibility fail 

@rowyn @ljwrites at least for me the captchas consistently only get triggered when i click fedi’s fancy preview box rather than the actual raw link…and given that the way fedi generates previews is more or less indistinguishable from bot spam ( see jort.link ) I can’t *really* blame them for not distinguishing?

Dreamwidth, Captcha shit, accessibility fail 

@Satsuma @ljwrites ohhhhhhh

That's it! If you look at this post: indiepocalypse.social/@Packbat

the preview window link gets turned into a captcha (and has the captcha stuff I copied) but the actual link at the top of the post is normal.

Dreamwidth, Captcha shit, accessibility fail 

@Satsuma @ljwrites so, yeah, it's not that the link itself is borked, but that Fedi's preview box doesn't work with Dreamwidth.

I wonder if there's a way to turn off the preview box when posting?

Dreamwidth, Captcha shit, accessibility fail 

@rowyn @Satsuma Oh wowww what kind of hellish web dev wtf. I can't believe disabling the preview box is even a discussion that needs to be had. Website boy fix this shit!!

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📟🐱 GlitchCat

A small, community‐oriented Mastodon‐compatible Fediverse (GlitchSoc) instance managed as a joint venture between the cat and KIBI families.