Hacking Accessible Pedestrian Signals is Not a Joke: It’s a Civil Rights Violation Audible signals are a critical safety tool for Blind pedestrians and advocacy is why we have them

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This is an article about crossing signals that speak out loud. They are designed to make it safer for blind people to cross the street. They are present on city streets because blind people have long advocated for them. Last week, someone hacked some of the signals in California and changed the safety message. They deleted the message telling people when to wait and when to cross. They replaced it with messages that sounded like it came from tech billionaires like elon musk or mark zuckerberg. The messages were meant to protest actions of these people. But accessible crossing signals are critical for blind people to safely and independently navigate city streets. Eliminating safety features is an accessibility and civil rights violation.

Blind activist Jerry Kuns pressing accessible pedestrian signal and holding white cane

On April 12, 2025 the top story on the Palo Alto (California) online news site was “Silicon Valley Crosswalk Buttons Apparently Hacked to Imitate Musk, Zuckerberg Voices” It told the story, covered by other media too, of how someone hacked into audible pedestrian signals so they broadcast messages such as “From undermining democracy, to cooking our grandparents’ brains with AI slop, to making the world less safe for trans people, nobody does it better than us – and I think that’s pretty neat..”

The Palo Alto Online story continued by sharing that “City employees determined that 12 downtown intersections were impacted and have disabled the voice announcement feature on the crosswalks until repairs can be made.”

There’s a glaring hole in this story and in all the reporting I’ve seen about this “hack.” The missing piece is this: Those signals have a voice announcements (and capability for audible output) because they are accessible signals that the blind community across the country have advocated and fought for for decades.

Hacking into an accessible pedestrian signal creates a dangerous situation. (Picture someone covering up a visual walk/don’t walk sign with a political message as a joke. Not cool.) Causing a city to “disable” a voice announcement before they can reinstate the safety information is also a civil rights violation. Even when we may agree with the political message.

Pedestrian signals are designed to make it safe for the public to cross the street. Denying blind people that safety information is unethical and wrong. These signals must be restored immediately.

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What is an accessible pedestrian signal

Accessible pedestrian signals deliver audible and tactile information for people who cannot see the visual safety information offered by a standard signal.

  • That voice announcement that says “Wait” or “Wait to Cross Main Street at Elm”? It provides critical safety information for blind people to know it is not safe to cross.
  • Those audible sounds that provide an alternative to visual safety information like flashing yellow lights or a digital walking person on a screen? That’s safety information too.
  • That big tactile vibrating button? That’s a safety feature too, offering an indicator that can be felt for people who are Deafblind or who need an additional piece of safety information

Advocacy is why we have accessible crossing signals

Accessibility advancements don’t fall from the sky. And they often don’t happen simply because the ADA says they should. They happen because disabled people fight for advancements in many different ways. Blind community advocacy is why we have accessible pedestrian signals (APS)

Structured Negotiation in San Francisco

I became involved in accessible pedestrian signal advocacy almost twenty years ago when the California Council of the Blind, the San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind, the San Francisco Independent Living Resource Center, and blind advocate Damien Pickering needed an advocacy strategy to convince San Francisco to install accessible signals. Together with my colleague Linda Dardarian, we decided on Structured Negotiation, the collaborative strategy that at the time had been used to advance accessibility for about five years.

I tell the story of those negotiations in my book, Structured Negotiation, a Winning Alternative to Lawsuits (2d edition 2021). The bottom line is that after several years of very detailed negotiations, without any lawsuits needed, we issued a joint press release with the City of San Francisco with the headline:

Installation of Accessible Pedestrian Signals Will Aid Blind, Visually Impaired Community: First Agreement of its Kind in the Nation Enhances Public Safety with State-of-the Art Signaling Devices, Averts Potential LitigationAccessible Pedestrian Signal Press Release, June 20, 2007

The negotiations were complex, with blind APS advocates who were themselves APS experts, meeting with traffic engineers, city policy makers, and other APS experts to hammer out just what those voice announcements would say — voice announcements likes those hacked last weekend. There was a seemingly endless list of other details too that make those signals safe.

Our 2007 agreement with San Francisco was detailed in scope and available on my website here. The APS Technical Specifications are on page two of the posted settlement agreement.)

Our first press release that year announced that the “City will commit at least $1.6 million over the next two and a half years to install accessible pedestrian signals.” A second release in 2010 announced the program was expanding. (If you search the word “pedestrian” on this website you will find other articles about the San Francisco effort.)

The advocacy didn’t stop when the agreement was signed. For several years leaders of the the disability organizations, including Jessie Lorenz who is quoted below, met regularly with the city to iron out implementation issues as they arose. And we were always out checking the signals to make sure they were working as intended. The image with this article is of San Francisco blind activist Jerry Kuns holding his white cane in one hand and pressing the tactile button on the APS in the other.

Lawsuit in Chicago

Structured Negotiation was not the only strategy used by advocates in the United States to get these critical safety features installed in the urban landscape. Just last month the non-profit legal firm of Disability Rights Advocates issued a press release in their long-running litigation with the City of Chicago announcing:

Court Rules That Chicago’s Intersections Must Be Made Accessible for Blind Pedestrians. Court Proposes Plan for Chicago to Install Thousands of Accessible Pedestrian Signals Over the Next 10 YearsDRA Chicago pedestrian signal announcement

More information about the APS advocacy efforts by DRA and its clients can be find on the organization’s website.

Why this matters

In closing, I share the thoughts of Jessie Lorenz is a blind tech professional who was very involved in the San Francisco accessible pedestrian negotiations when she worked at the SF ILRC. Jessie sums up why the history of APS advocacy matters, and why this seemingly innocuous hack of APS is dangerous, unethical, and a civil rights violation:

I’m a blind tech professional, and accessible pedestrian signals are how I safely cross complex streets. Most people with vision loss are older adults–not your target demo for a prank. Swapping safety for Elon Musk’s voice isn’t clever–it’s a reminder of how easy it is to break accessibility when you’re not thinking about who really depends on it.Jessie Lorenz, a blind tech professional living in Seattle