Using websites in 2023 without an Ad blocker is like wrestling an octopus. Entirely unusable.

From an accessibility standpoint I fail to see how it’s not illegal. So many things steal focus from assistive technologies.

I challenge you to spend a day trying to use the web without seeing what’s on the screen, with only what your OS provides. And no ad blocker.

Or with only voice controls, or any other assistive tech. If more organisations did this, they’d soon see how actively hostile they’re being to those with accessibility needs.

Accessibility should be part of the design, testing, QA, and UAT for your website or product.

And don’t give me “but how do smaller organisations manage that?” - if this were law, within 6 months you could get off the shelf themes for WordPress or Wix or Bootstrap that manage it all for you.

It’s not a technical problem. It’s political will.

Requiring website visitors to disable 500 categories of cookies to use your site without being tracked (where your choices actually work) shouldn’t be any more legal than automatically opting them is. Pass it on.

THEN after selection using dark patterns, weasel wording, and button colouring/positioning to get users to accidentally undo those settings, should also illegal.

If you’re using those plug-ins or went to the effort of making your own do this, I’m just not going to use your site - but my browser doesn’t save cookies anyway.

We have one client which we manage an Azure tenant for. They require, and have specified, a zero-tolerance for device non-compliance.

In roughly two hours, 1647 devices are about to be locked out of access to organisation resources, wiped, and removed from Intune permanently.

4 meetings, 124 emails, and two phone calls a day for the last 14 days have warned them of this.

We’ve been *very* clear about what is about to happen for the last 13 months. Their internal management have *acknowledged* what is about to happen. But still, time marches on.

Death by middle-management.

🍿