Facebook Takes Aim at Ad Blockers, Hits Blind Users and Researchers Instead

In July of last year, a group of Facebook engineers published a blog post meant to show off a few of the efforts the company had undertaken to make its site more accessable to those using screen readers. Among the updates listed was a plugin meant to alert developers of potential ARIA violations whenever developers plugged new features into the platform—kind of a reminder that the potential addition might not be friendly to users with visual impairments.

When contacted by Gizmodo about the changes, a company spokesperson noted the following:

We constantly make code changes across our services, but we did not make recent code changes to block these research projects. Our accessibility features largely appear to be working as normal, however, we are investigating the claimed disruptions.

It doesn’t seem like the update raised any red flags for developers. Nor has it seemed to raise red flags in the past, where we’ve seen Facebook reportedly leave its blind users unable to identify spon-con in their News Feed for years at a time. For the sake of this community, let’s hope Facebook’s willing to put its myriad beefs with ad-blocking users and ad-investigating researchers to the side.

Update 1:45 p.m. ET: Added statement from Facebook.