No one cares about accessibility when ad dollars are at stake.

They do when regulators come calling with significant penalties.

> They do when regulators come calling with significant penalties.

I'm pretty sure Facebook considers pissed off regulators a regular cost of doing business.

if(ad_dollars > fines) { do_evil(); }

s/if/while/

There are no significant penalties at this time.

They're not focusing on sites like FB, because using them isn't a requirement of any meaningful task.

Lawyers are definitely going after things like companies' job sites. Applying for a job is a protected action and no discrimination is allowed, either intentional or not.

No, but there more and more lawsuits filed every year over website accessibility issues.

https://www.adatitleiii.com/2019/01/number-of-federal-websit...

One of my first thoughts when I saw this was about screen readers. If searching "Sponsored" in Chrome doesn't match the posts, I'd wager screen readers would just go ahead and try to pronounce all the extra 'S's.

It works fine.

Screen readers obey CSS, this uses CSS to hide all of the additional elements (display: none). Screen readers are also designed to work when text is broken up by other inline elements e.g.:

He<b>llo</b> world

In this case it reads out both the words Sponsored and Public.

> If searching "Sponsored" in Chrome doesn't match the posts

That also worked perfectly fine in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. Did you scroll enough to render any Sponsored posts?

So the technology to defeat this kind of obfuscation has already been developed and is reliable?

Well a web browser has to render it correctly, so yes? A screen reader is just another type of browser at this point.

These techniques work because some blockers only support a limited subset of what a full browser can do (namely block resource locations and specific HTML elements).

And rather insignificant to implement. All this protects against is low-effort document scraping. If they randomized it somehow, that would be a little harder to defeat.