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Today I am disappointed and disgusted to say that #WesternDigital have sent me an email that has very important content in it, but it's inaccessible.
They've suffered a data breach, but the information about said breach has been put into the email as an image.
A #ScreenReader user without some level of tech knowledge would be unable to read that, and may actually think it's spam. To us, it goes straight to the line that says 'Copyright 2023 Western Digital' and skips all the salient points.
Utterly disgusting behaviour from such a large company about such an important topic.
If you're of a mind to do so, please boost to raise awareness.
This email is seemingly *not* a drill.
I feel like I'm gonna have to go to friggin twitter so I can @ these idiots and get them to send out a much better, more responsible email but jeez. What an utter clusterfuck.
I would love if #DarkNetDiaries could get a hold of this crock of shite and discuss it on their podcast.
I threw this utter travesty up on #BirdSite as well (of course with far fewer characters at my disposal) so if anyone still has an account over there and wouldn't mind retweeting for traction, I've also tagged Western Digital and their customer service team, because naturally they don't have a presence here. Thanks.
https://twitter.com/FreakyFwoof/status/1655140407829725184?s=20
@FreakyFwoof wtf I don't get this. The text has already been written, why the extra step to put it in an image? Just paste it in your email and your good to go 
@stvfrnzl Sigh... If I knew trust me I'd be richer than shit.
@FreakyFwoof The thing I don't understand when this happens is, unless someone scribbled the message on a piece of paper or something, it almost certainly originated as plain text. If so, they needed to take a deliberate step to convert it into an inaccessible format, and what's the point of doing that?
@jaybird110127 If I knew that, I would be very, very rich. And still very angry...
@FreakyFwoof I just got this and was baffled because I work with images off by default. Checking the raw message data I can confirm there's no image description nor a plain text version of the message in there. #accessibility aside, it's long been best practice for email senders to include #plaintext equivalents when sending HTML email. #WesternDigital #DataBreach
@medwds My phone also has images off by default, so I had to force it to download something that of course, should have been plain text to begin with. Livid? Yep.
I wonder if they do that to make it harder to copy/paste...
@float13 @FreakyFwoof Probably not. Apparently a lot of news letters are offered as images because of how all over the place email rendering is. Like you have everything from webkit and chromium on iOS/Android, webmails can strip things out and anyone using Microsoft Outlook is essentially rendering the emails in Microsoft Word which is as cursed as it sounds. So, they just take the easy way out and send one giant image, and maybe a text footer to go with it. My favorite ones are the kind where they remembered that alt tags exist, only to use them to say "pleeeeeeeease turn on displaying remote images!"
@float13 @FreakyFwoof Oh and scammers use it to avoid antispam. I've received image only emails with simple subjects like Hello with a single image. OCR'ing it usually revealed a fake invoice from Paypal for Norton or some other software with an obviously fake hotline number to contest the charge
@pitermach @float13 @FreakyFwoof
I guess they are unwilling to send text-only emails? :/
@FediThing @float13 @FreakyFwoof They can’t put their fancy graphics, fonts and tracking pixels into those so I guess not lol.
@float13 Given the usefulness of the content, you'd think they'd want you to copy/paste it everywhere for further reach. And giving a phone number in the image means you can't double-click to call it or anything like that. Utterly incompetent tits. Never have I seen the like from a big company about something so important.
@FreakyFwoof @Laniebird91 Oh FFS. And, yeah, the breach they had was very real. The head of security with my company puts that kind of stuff out on blast for awareness.
@FreakyFwoof Andre, the only thing I have about western digital is https://technology.jaredrimer.net/2023/04/03/two-sources-say-that-wester-digitals-file-sharing-service-is-down/ which talks about a file sharing service being down. https://technology.jaredrimer.net/2021/07/05/western-digital-drives-remotely-wiped-what-experts-say-to-do-now/ talks about drives that got wiped and links to an article. https://technology.jaredrimer.net/2021/07/06/western-digital-is-not-done-more-zero-days-on-the-way/ talks about more zero-days being out in the wild. These are all oder posts, and the fact they communicated to you this way in an accessible way is not called for. Too bad we can't call and wine about that crap. That's stupid.
@FreakyFwoof This is even more mind-boggling because it's truly one of those cases where doing the right thing vis a vis accessibility benefits everyone, not just disabled people. There is absolutely no good or legitimate reason to send out a text email as an image. No one likes to receive emails like this. It's hostile to everyone.
@jik Exactly so. I find this to be beyond stupid.
@FreakyFwoof I think that this #ableist #eMail bs should be #illegal and does not satisfy the notification requirements.
Also even for #abled people this is just bad, since a lot of them - like myself - will be sometimes if permanently on #WWAN like #2G, #3G or #4G and thus not download attachments at all, but only the text.
And yes, I do also automatically mark all #HTML - #eMails as #Spam so they won't even show up in my #Inbox.
@FreakyFwoof
Not to mention they purposefully put the text into an image, which makes it a real #Asshole move in my opinion since they could've just used Teyt instead, but they chose to not do so!
I hope they get their asses handed by customers and that https://wbs.legal will force them to compensate affected customers in Germany like they did with #Facebook's #DataBreach...
@FreakyFwoof Adding some tags:
#Accessibility #Ableism
@FreakyFwoof I feel your pain here. Not pertaining to this specific email you received but this thing in general when companies decide to put only images in the emails which is beyond useless.
@FreakyFwoof Also, what is the darknet diaries podcast?
@TheVoiceGuy Very good, is what it is. Highly recommend checking it out.
@FreakyFwoof With that glowing recommendation, I think I should.
@TheVoiceGuy Put it this way. When I was told about it, I played about 5-10 episodes at 1.5x in the same day back to back. I got through the rest within the next month or so, listening to nothing else for that time.
@FreakyFwoof From the little bit I have listened to so far as I’m checking the download progress, this is definitely a keeper
@TheVoiceGuy The first 5 minutes of the first episode, I knew without a shred of a doubt I was gonna get the hell into it, and I did. Hardcore.
@FreakyFwoof Jesus I can’t wait.
So I thought I'd provide a link to the Darkrnet Diaries website and the podcast feed URL, but the website doesn't display in @privacybrowser probably because the website is Javascript-dependent, or #Javascrippled. So there's an inaccessible dark pattrern that makes me never want to visit again.
How do people with screen readers deal with that?
@FreakyFwoof Christ! I’m downloading it now after hearing that.
@FreakyFwoof Just musing here: if the image is loaded from a remote site, maybe they are trying to track readers and/or leaving themselves a way to edit the text later in.
If the image is attached to the email, then they're just doing email wrong.
And even for sighted users, the dark background of the picture makes the text hard to read.
@schalken I admit I have no idea, but if the info changes, make a blog post like a *real* company, link to that and then if information changes last-minute, it's obvious from the page, right?
@FreakyFwoof sheesh. I don’t even have to be impaired to find that shit annoying to read (visually) 
@FreakyFwoof what lazy bullshit is this?! Unbelievable
@FreakyFwoof shipping addresses and telephone numbers are not "limited" information.
@FreakyFwoof @zleap We could all call them at 00800-27549938 with our questions about their denying visually impaired customers access to this information. Or, least, we could if that were a valid phone number.
@gorfram @zleap@qoto.org Aah yes the double 0. I saw that but thought it was an error that the OCR software I used, had made.
@FreakyFwoof @zleap There are also eight digits after the 800 area code. If you dial that in the US, I think the phone system just ignores digit #8; but it’d but interesting to know if you’d get Western Digital on the other end of the line.
*although not interesting enough for me to bother trying it
@gorfram @zleap@qoto.org I have tried taking off the first 0 and the last digit, and it does not connect. So not only did they provide information in a stupid way, but a phone number that doesn't in fact, work in the first place. Incompetence knows no bounds.
@gorfram @zleap@qoto.org Hi. This morning I was told that number was actually for Austria of all places, not the UK, so it wasn't properly tailored to the person it was being sent to. Haa!
@FreakyFwoof Thanks for taking the time to highlight this. I got the same email and quickly scanned with VoiceOver text detection and then moved on with my day. Already being low energy so much of the time lends itself incredibly well to not having the extra energy to advocate loudly against idiotic, low-hanging fruit like this. And as long as we stay silent, nothing will change.
@tristan I cannot stay quiet when I'm absolutely livid like that. It's just not in my nature.
Can I be real a second? We disabled folks need to bring our own accessibility. Using OCR, machine learning, or whatever other methods might become available. We can't count on the rest of the world to provide it for us, and insisting that they should and getting outraged about it is futile.