Dear Facebook,

You are supposedly aware of the fact that starting last Saturday, blind iOS Facebook users can no longer access posts that contain colored backgrounds. When encountering these posts, Voiceover simply states, “Awesome text status.” Many of us have reported this bug, both on social media and through your official accessibility feedback form, but have received only canned responses that you are aware of this issue and are currently investigating it. The most recent post on your accessibility page is still an homage to Matt King, your token blind engineer; you have neither apologized nor given us concrete information about when this bug will be resolved. Why am I not surprised?

Image: a screenshot of a Facebook status “Awesome Text Status” on a wavy rainbow background. The user has commented on their own status “This is what your blind friends see when you use a colored background right now on facebook. Fb has opted to not bother setting up colored background statuses to work with screenreaders.” The user’s name and photo are scribbled out.

Back in 2016, when I wrote about how your automated alt text feature wasn’t actually useful for blind people, and intuited that your intention had more to do with generating media hype than helping us, one could argue that I was being unduly harsh. After all, at the time I posted the piece, the feature had just been released. But more than two years have passed, and I’m sorry to say that my intuition has been borne out through facts. Sure, you’ve added a few more words and phrases to the database that automated alt text uses, as well as facial recognition, but the descriptions remain as vague and generic as ever. And you still haven’t implemented any sort of optical character recognition, even though Microsoft’s Seeing AI does a passible job at recognizing the text of most Facebook posts. The technology exists; you just refuse to use it. More important, however, is that you’ve continued your appalling track record of breaking accessibility features with every update. When reading long posts, Voiceover constantly interrupts itself every time a notification appears, forcing the user to start reading the post from the beginning, or to scroll through lines of text. Blind users can’t reliably access the “on this day” feature because they are told, incorrectly, that a double tap will activate the story. Selecting multiple users to invite to a page through the iOS app is not possible. Neither is sharing a group to another page, or countless other basic tasks. But this “awesome text status” bug is the last straw. It shows that your accessibility testing processes are flawed enough for a bug of this magnitude to surface. As blind Facebook user Chris Meredith puts it, “This offends me more as a QA professional than as a blind person. You broke functionality such that posts are unreadable to an entire demographic.” If this sort of bug was affecting sighted users, you’d fix it. Immediately. But because we’re an after-thought, we’re treated like a speck on your radar.

I, for one, am done being treated like a speck. Some blind people are quick to jump to your defense, claiming that your accessibility team is small and perhaps doesn’t have the power to block releases after accessibility is broken. I’d buy such justifications if you were a mom and pop operation on a shoestring budget. But you’re not. You’re fucking Facebook. You have billions of dollars at your disposal. If you’re accessibility team is small and underpowered, it’s not because you don’t have the resources to make systemic change. It’s because you believe that shoddy accessibility is enough accessibility. If updates keep breaking functionality for blind users, that’s a lesson to you that accessibility should be baked in to the design, not haphazardly added at the last minute. If you’re team is too small, hire more developers. If the team doesn’t have the authority to block buggy releases, give them that authority.

You claim to care about accessibility, but actions speak louder than words. Get your shit together, Facebook.

Signed,

Tasha