I'm very much of the opinion that almost all modern captchas are american-centric. Mailboxes, fire hydrants, Trams are not recognizable for billions of people.
Sidewalks/Crosswalks: American English terms
Traffic Lights: We never put them in strings above roads
A lot of US-centric assumptions built into captchas I see
For international websites it would be good to follow the users chosen language. But if a website doesn't have a english version(or other alphabet based version), expecting alphabets in a captcha is not very reasonable.
As an American expat living in a country that doesn't speak English by default... I'd say it's fairly reasonable. Captchas aren't the responsibility of the site owner, the captcha integration docs should explain how to pass the language through to them and should require developers to do so.
Cheese is though? And I'm pretty sure most of the world would recognise those things anyway - you forget how much American culture is spread through films and TV.
Just for context, 65% of India is rural and a ton of these people do not have access to the internet and will have zero idea how to get through these arcane captchas. The internet is effectively locked off to them
While I agree with both the theme and vigor of your position, your sentence made me wonder how people are seeing CAPTCHAs without the internet?
Damn I didn't know so many rural Indians without internet access are using AirBnB...