May 2019

There were 12 posts published in May 2019 (this is page 2 of 2).

Demand letters are the single most ineffective tool for creating meaningful improvements with regard to web accessibility, and are the quickest way to torpido the cultural and policy changes which allow technical fixes to be anything more than temporary, surface-level progress. Demand letters serve only to turn accessibility advocates into ambulance chasers. This is a hill I will absolutely die on and anyone who disagrees with me is more than welcome to bring it on.
Read WordPress 5.2: Mitigating Supply-Chain Attacks Against 33% of the Internet by Scott Arciszewski

WordPress 3.7 was released on October 24, 2013 and introduced an automatic update mechanism to ensure security fixes would be automatically deployed on all WordPress sites, in an effort to prevent recently-patched vulnerabilities from being massively exploited in the wild. This is widely regarded by security experts as a good idea.
However, the WordPress automatic update feature had one glaring Achilles’ heel: If a criminal or nation state were to hack into the WordPress update server, they could trigger a fake automatic update to infect WordPress sites with malware.
This isn’t just a theoretical concern, it could have happened if not for WordFence’s security researchers finding and disclosing an easy attack vector into their infrastructure.
WordPress 5.2 was released on May 7, 2019 and provides the first real layer of defense against a compromised update infrastructures: offline digital signatures.

Everybody is swooning over Google’s upcoming automated captions, except zero of the people who actually need them. I have to wondere how it is that as an industry we manage to convince ourselves that we’ve collaborated with people with disabilities on all this amazing new accessibility tech that helps us avoid the obvious solution: Do it right in the first place. I’m sure there were messages across email lists, or surveys, or whatever, with asks for testers, ETC. But the deaf community has been saying for years that automated captions aren’t an optimal solution, and it seems arrogant to me at worst and well-meaningly naive at best that all that advice about automated captions would be ignored for the sake of Google’s business goals. We know what accessibility advancements look like, because people with disabilities have been telling us what they need, for years. Maybe one day as an industry we’ll actually start listening. I’m not holding my breath for the foreseeable future though.
Read Who Do You Sue? State and Platform Hybrid Power Over Online Speech by DAPHNE KELLER

This essay closely examines the effect on free-expression rights when platforms such as Facebook or YouTube silence their users’ speech. The first part describes the often messy blend of government and private power behind many content removals, and discusses how the combination undermines users’ rights to challenge state action. The second part explores the legal minefield for users—or potentially, legislators—claiming a right to speak on major platforms. The essay contends that questions of state and private power are deeply intertwined. To understand and protect internet users’ rights, we must understand and engage with both.

This essay from the Hoover Institute is worth a read for anyone discussing either online speech in general or the embarrassingly wrong pieces on Sec. 230 which have appeared in both Vox and the Washington Post in the last few days. Click here to read the full version in as accessible a format as possible without having to download the document yourself and tag it.
Read ‘Work with Facebook or die’: Mark Zuckerberg by DARREN DAVIDSON

A senior Facebook executive has privately admitted Mark Zuckerberg “doesn’t care” about publishers and warned that if they did not work with the social media giant, “I’ll be holding your hands with your dying business like in a ­hospice”.
In extraordinary comments, Campbell Brown, Facebook’s global head of news partnerships, indicated to publishers and broad­casters in a four-hour meeting last week that despite Mr Zuckerberg’s view, she would help publishers build sustainable business models through Facebook.

This doesn’t just apply to news organizations. Anyone who publishes to Facebook is deemed a publisher by them. And anyone who has worked in the accessibility space for two seconds knows that if you don’t have stakeholder buy-in, efforts to remedy a situation like this are doomed to fail. So don’t hold your breath on Facebook’s global head of news partnerships being able to hault Zuck’s advancements toward publishing dominance.