Anastasia Salter, Director of Graduate Programs and Texts and Technology, was featured in a CNN article about how the end of Adobe Flash has rendered some news coverage of the September 11 attacks inaccessible.
Adobe Flash was the first software that could display animations, games and videos online across browsers and devices. At the end of 2020, Adobe officially ended support for Flash — and in doing so, it made existing Flash-based content inaccessible, including some of the original online news coverage of 9/11. For example, online coverage by The Washington Post, ABC News and CNN that once had interactive multimedia supported by Flash now features non-functioning still images or gray boxes informing readers that “Adobe Flash Player is no longer supported.”
“Web preservationists have been sounding the alarm on Flash for a long time,” says Salter. “Unfortunately, it’s a lot more difficult than we’d like [to restore Flash content], particularly because ‘Flash’ encompasses generations of work and the platform’s code complexity grew with every iteration of Adobe’s scripting language.”
Read the full story on CNN.