I really really need the media to be better at covering accessibility failures the same way they cover security and privacy concerns.

I'm seeing direct confirmation that members of the Xbox accessibility team were also impacted today. If you would like to speak about your experience, please send me a message or email. I'll be happy to give you my signal, as well

Sharing again. If you are a developer who worked on accessibility impacted by these layoffs, I'm working on a story for @aftermath.site. I can promise full anonymity.

Yeah, fuck this. Our public money is essentially being diverted from science to supporting the stock prices of ruling party donors.

Future historian department: -Front page of today's NYT reports creation of world's first trillionaire. -Lead op-ed of same NYT is about worst-ever Ebola outbreak, which *this VERY SAME trillionaire* enabled, with his "chainsaw" destruction of US public health in the world. The book writes itself

@krittikaa.bsky.social that was good. i like how it called out the anti-collaboration and individual nature of prototyping with ai.

Send them this? www.frank.computer/blog/2026/03... (Though I don’t agree with the deodorant snark at the end 😂)

Late to this, but - very good (and entertaining!) read from @frank.computer on the Tufte school of data viz. Friends who like to agonize over whether each gridline has earned its ink will relate:

I think the write up from @jonathanzong.com and @frank.computer perfectly captures this problem. It’s humiliating being told we can’t fund basic accessibility initiatives when we can throw billions at AI while using disabled people as mascots to justify it www.techpolicy.press/the-web-is-b...

This is what makes social media extremely difficult, imo. The social norms around what a post is doing are extremely complex and unsettled. Are you looking for advice? Are you wanting to start a debate or conversation? Are you looking for emotional support? These are hard to tell from a post

Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will. We can only but win. 😌

If you're an academic and are worried about AI and feel powerless, don't let it get to you. It's actually what they want. They want us to burn out and give up. You can turn off the internet and chill. I promise. All you need to do is stay strong, with breaks of course. From an email I sent an ally:

This looks awesome! A data viz course from the authors of Data Feminism, @laurenfklein.bsky.social and @kanarinka.bsky.social. So excited to teach with these materials! openvisualizationacademy.org/courses/data...

Got a theory that we are all living through a crisis of agency, at least online. Bots, algorithms, clip armies, & the flood of AI stuff have scrambled notions of popularity, turned everything into a ‘psyop’. AI tools/ agents are reversing the fundamental human, collaborative promise of the internet

LLMs are actually very authoritarian when viewed in this way (as centralized mechanisms for distributing/discovering information). Of course this is part and parcel of big tech’s move away from classically democratic and Liberal values

Minnesota keeps doing things that Illinoisans are repeatedly told are impossible

It’s not quite smashing the cameras with a hammer, but denying Flock and cops access to this surveillance system while protecting people from further datafication is one form contemporary Luddism might take.

TIL heat is really killing a lot of people in Europe. hannahritchie.substack.com/p/heat-guns-...

It is a truth universally recognized that any society can be judged by its availability and state of public restrooms

WMF spent 20 years telling donors it wasn't like other tech companies. Then in ten days it fired MediaWiki's longtime lead, dissolved the Community Tech team, and most of those let go were union organizers. Now sitting on $296M in reserves and working hard to undo years of good will and built trust.

Yesss so excited to take this myself!

BIG NEWS in the Open Visualization Academy: openvisualizationacademy.beehiiv.com/p/data-femin... We're launching 'Data Feminism for Data Visualization' by @laurenfklein.bsky.social and @kanarinka.bsky.social #dataViz #infographics #dataVisualization #dataJournalism

Students were always my imagined readers when I was writing DATA FEMINISM. Every time I asked myself, "How do I explain this clearly?" or "Why should people care?" I was thinking of them. So getting to build a course around those questions felt like coming back to my (Google Docs) home

A colleague raised their feeling of Deep Blue (simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/15/...) about visualization libraries: what's the place for visualization libraries like @vega-vis.bsky.social when frontier models can write SQL and D3 directly?

First, learning all those things brought me joy, brought me community, and brought me an understanding I would not have otherwise had (I think learning with AI is really hard because it can give us mental shortcuts; @frank.computer wrote about this in www.frank.computer/blog/2026/05...).

One of the many sources cited in the new papal encyclical is... Gandalf

Move slow and don't break things

“My thoughts are precious and being able to form them through writing and socializing with others currently has no equal practice. Prompting appears to give the benefits of both the writing and socializing at once, but it actually steals the benefits of doing both of these acts from us.”

Time is the *primary* currency and always has been. Big Dollar just wants you to think otherwise. Feminist views of domestic labor, crip phenomenologies, and post-colonial/anti-capitalist critiques all re-center time. At the end of our life, people have regrets for losing time, not dollars.

www.theringer.com/2026/05/22/n... jesus THANK YOU

"You’ve read a million pearl-clutching op-eds about woke professors and cancel culture, but for my money, the real crisis facing American higher education is that colleges & universities are increasingly run by people who are hostile to students & professors, &...the idea of the university itself."

"When a society is unmoved by decades of advocacy from disabled communities but springs into action when a tech company needs the same accommodation, it reveals whose claims on shared resources are treated as legitimate and whose are treated as optional." By @jonathanzong.com and @frank.computer

It would be cheaper and more effective just to give a lot of people money

Happy Global Accessibility Awareness Day! #a11y #GAAD

As agentic AI rapidly transforms internet infrastructure, how do we ensure disabled people's needs are not displaced? In a new article by me and @frank.computer, we argue that accessibility must not be treated as an incidental benefit of rapid AI expansion. Read below:

New piece out with @jonathanzong.com where we look at how accessible infrastructure has been continually coopted by technological advancements, and both people with disabilities and everyone else now must compete for use of these spaces.

This is probably preaching to the choir here, but @jonathanzong.com and @frank.computer have a 🔥 new @techpolicypress.bsky.social op-ed on how AI co-opts, tokenizes, denigrates, and drains the political economy of disability rights. 1/2

New piece out with @jonathanzong.com where we look at how accessible infrastructure has been continually coopted by technological advancements, and both people with disabilities and everyone else now must compete for use of these spaces.

This is the summer of micro-papers: small ideas, shared freely, archived for posterity. I've had 2 separate emails and multiple new citations based on my micro-paper I wrote for micro-papers back in 2023.

My kingdom for a tech ecosystem that will stop smothering me with apps and devices that constantly try to engage me in conversation against my will

This is the summer of micro-papers: small ideas, shared freely, archived for posterity. I've had 2 separate emails and multiple new citations based on my micro-paper I wrote for micro-papers back in 2023.

Yes! The social value of peer review is not as a filter of bad vs good, despite what folks may think this process accomplishes. The social value of peer review is simply as a means of gathering anonymous, subjective feedback. Every other benefit or shortcoming is peripheral or downstream from this.

too soon

I've heard great arguments for rejecting AI for environmental reasons (water, climate, energy) and for ethical reasons (like the theft of all digitizable intellectual property). But I also want to suggest another angle that can be used in conjunction with these: rejecting genAI for selfish reasons.

Not just lobbying! our new paper maps 27 mechanisms of regulatory capture used by Big AI + 11 narrative framings that rationalise capture. “Big AI’s Regulatory Capture: Mapping Industry Interference and Government Complicity” will be presented at #FAccT2026 next month arxiv.org/abs/2605.068... 1/

Preprint of our #FAccT2026 paper on Big AI's regulatory capture is now on ArXiv: arxiv.org/abs/2605.06806 Check out the quoted 🧵 by @abeba.blacksky.app for more details of our findings and recommendations.

Every couple of months, this post gets picked up and shared and then another couple dozen likes get thrown on. I still believe this is one of my favorite blog posts I've written. And this, of course, is a meta point: writing this blog post myself helped me form my thoughts. I'm thankful for that.

"Tools afford some behaviors and discourage others" is a concept that is too difficult for the average AI thought leader to grasp, unfortunately.

Remember: farmers = farm owners, not workers, and most of the former are millionaires