friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

On the 13th of august this year Česká spořitelna, a.s. have published an update to their #George banking app for #Android. that completelly disables #accessibility support when no white listed accessibility service is running on the device.

Thus #czech blind users who have updated their George app to the latest version can't run other accessibility services on their phones besides white listed apps such as TalkBack. I don't know which other apps are white listed yet.

I am afraid other Erste Bank subsidiaries or partner banks might do the same thing in the future. So this might potentially affect #austrian and #slovak blind people.

Here are the version numbers:

George Österreich 26.22.21 - appears to be accessible
George Slovensko 26.22.19 - Appears to be accessible
George Česká republika 26.26.21 - No longer accessible with 3rd party screen readers.

#Accessibility #android #czech #slovak #George #austrian

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in reply to Peter Vágner
glitchsoc - Link to source

Paweł Masarczyk

Plugging @Matschmuck , the Erste Bank's accessibility tester here in Austria. I believe the most realistic path forward would be the expansion of the white list which could be quite a challenge given the number of Talkback forks that appeared recently.
@Mathias Schmuckerschlag
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk
friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Peter Vágner

@Paweł Masarczyk @Mathias Schmuckerschlag I'm afraid whitelisting screen reader package names is not a good idea unless they would like to expand it to verifying signing certificate fingerprints as well. Malicious actors can then just pretend to be one of the whitelisted app by reusing the same package name. This is really unfortunate.
@Paweł Masarczyk @Mathias Schmuckerschlag
in reply to Paweł Masarczyk
friendica (DFRN) - Link to source

Peter Vágner

@Paweł Masarczyk @Mathias Schmuckerschlag Why I think banks are doing all of this in the first place are not screen readers but apps that are trying to use accessibility features for malicious activities such as key loggers, overlays, automation apps doing fraud. Android it-self makes it complicated to enable such accessibility services. Adding another layer of protection just makes it more painfull for both users and screen reader developers. By introducing more fragmentation I think it may even weaken the security rather than improving it.
@Paweł Masarczyk @Mathias Schmuckerschlag