Fac ebook code#
Rather than presenting a clear and simplified structure, he said, the accessibility code was hugely complex, potentially heralding problems down the road.
Fac ebook update#
Jared Smith, associate director of accessibility research and training nonprofit WebAIM, expressed concerns about the code in Facebook’s web update after reviewing it for The Markup.Īccording to Smith, the new updates break many basic rules of accessibility design. “Our accessibility features largely appear to be working as normal, however we are investigating the claim,” Facebook’s Wagner said. In at least one circumstance, a developer from The Markup who was testing the new code found that the Microsoft Narrator screen reader read aloud a string of junk characters as an unintelligible word when accessing the site through the Google Chrome browser. As the update has not yet been rolled out to all users, it’s unclear what, if any, impact the change may have on visually impaired users. In its latest update, Facebook seems to have implemented the code in a way that prevents screen readers from reading the new tags. And in 2020, Quartz reported that visually impaired users had been unable to hear a legible label distinguishing between sponsored and nonsponsored posts for the previous two years because the platform had added numerous junk characters to the text to reduce the efficiency of ad blocking software. In 2019, the company made changes to obfuscate its code in a way that blocked ad collection efforts by ProPublica, Mozilla, and British ad transparency group WhoTargetsMe. “I think it’s unfortunate that Facebook is continuing to fight with researchers rather than work with them,” she said.įacebook has used similar tweaks to attempt to frustrate researchers and ad blockers in the past, often with the result of making the platform less accessible to visually impaired users. I think it’s unfortunate that Facebook is continuing to fight with researchers rather than work with them, Laura Edelson, NYU Ad Observatory The website update had at first caused a sharp drop in the amount of data collected by the Ad Observatory, she said, but a fix was found that allowed the team to collect data at normal levels.
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candidate in computer science at NYU’s Tandon School of Engineering and founder of the Ad Observatory project, expressed dismay at Facebook’s latest move impacting data collection.
At around the same time, users of certain ad blockers noticed a decrease in their effectiveness. “We constantly make code changes across our services, but we did not make any code changes to block these research projects,” Lindy Wagner, communications manager at Facebook, said in an email to The Markup.įollowing the changes, the Citizen Browser project experienced a drop in data collection rates from early September, prompting the investigation that uncovered these changes to the code. Such code is also used by organizations like NYU’s Ad Observatory to identify sponsored posts on the platform and weed them out for further scrutiny.
Fac ebook software#
The updates add superfluous text to news feed posts in the form of ARIA tags, an element of HTML code that is not rendered visually by a standard web browser but is used by screen reader software to map the structure and read aloud the contents of a page. Because it turns out moving fast and breaking things broke some super important things.
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