As we prepare Here is the original toot with the boost that got me to read this post that will be linked.
Kevin Fjelsted: Boosting Selena Larson (selenalarson): Thanks to @couts for letting me share the story of my blind friend getting scammed, using OSINT/social engineering to track down the scamming network, and reminding me of the importance of empathy in cyber. Also a great reminder of how people with disabilities experience the internet differently. https://www.wired.com/story/twitter-laptop-scam-hunters/
Here is the article. Its titled Twitter Scammers Stole $1,000 From My Friend—So I Hunted Them Down
This is a true story where the blind man even got help reporting the crime. As of writing time, he has not received any support or his money back.
There is some truth to this story. Screen readers can’t tell us of mistakes like all caps, that is, unless we ask for it as part of reading. I know that Window-Eyes used to allow us to select alerting us about caps, but I do not know if Jaws or NVDA allow for this. But for every day reading, I don’t want to read stuff like “I want to know wheter cap I will do that.” as the example.
I know that screen readers do allow us to interrogate whether punctuation is around by reading some or all or none of it.
The problem here is with Twitter. Like Selena, I’m never going to refer to the platform as X. X means nothing. The fact it will be rebranded later on to potentially do banking among other things is scary.
I should in fact stop posting to Twitter and remove my access to it. I need it for some things, but maybe its time.
I know too well the stories of being contacted, asked to change platforms, asked for gift cards, the whole bit. I’ve experienced this and unfortunately the platforms don’t care too much about that.
Facebook is probably no better.
These platforms are going to be a real problem for us, because there is no way for us to know whether they’re hacked. I don’t know what the solution is.
I do know that this blind man is probably not the only one.
How sad!