RE: Ad conformance

Well, here is one point I was too timid to raise on Thursday with 5
minutes left. If services providers are pushing a range of adverts most
of which are simple gifs with an alt text. Then how can the site using
the advertising know for certain that there are not one or two
inaccessible ads and hence ruining their conformance. I have been
thinking about it, and since most sites use <iframe> to have ad content
served up to their site. This means that all the things we are asking
them to stop ad content from doing they have no control over. This
brings us full circle to that the ad content providers have to comply.
 
I am also afraid, however trivial it seems this is an issue we have to
deal with thoroughly we can not sweep it under the carpet. The reason I
say this is that whatever our own thoughts on the matter WCAG is quickly
becoming the defacto standard of what reasonable levels of
accessibility. I can see a situation where someone finds a site
inaccessible, sues the site, who sue the ad provider. This of course
would lead to a whole lot of wrangling over what is accessible and what
isn't, and WCAG being used to justify two cases at once. Whatever legal
decision happened could easily put acceptable accessibility in a
direction we do not agree with. So as political as it is, I suggest that
we make sure whatever our line is on this is rock solid. This I don't
think is. 
 
So I guess I have to fall back on what Cynthia said, this is something
EO should look at. If they can get conformance (not really a hard thing)
from the ad providers there will be much less of problem.
 
Taciturnly,
 
Tom
 
-----Original Message-----
From: w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org [mailto:w3c-wai-gl-request@w3.org] On
Behalf Of Gregg Vanderheiden
Sent: 19 September 2003 03:04
To: w3c-wai-gl@w3.org
Subject: FW: Ad conformance
 
How to handle Advertisements
 
The following was the result of discussions on today's teleconference
call.
 
 
The suggestion was that sites be allowed to claim conformance even if
advertisements did not conform as long as 
the advertisements did not block access to the rest of the content.  
 
Ways that ads could block access to the rest of the content included:
 1. causing seizures 
 2. distraction 
 3. flashing screen reader readable text which might grab focus of
screen readers 
 4. pop ups
 5. advertisements which either steal or keep keyboard focus
 6. ads which make a page refresh periodically and thus caused screen
readers to reset.
 
It was commented that all but the seizure part might be okay if it was
only temporary.  That is, it only continued for a short period of time
and then stopped automatically  - or - if it was easy for the user to
stop it.   That is, the behavior only persists for N seconds after the
person first enters the page (where N is two or three seconds or so but
probably not as long as 8 or 10).
 
It was also felt that if the user agent could prevent or turn off any of
these behaviors then there would not be a need for the author to do
that.  It would still be recommended that the authors not do it, but it
wouldn't be a requirement.
 
The definition of distraction has to be crafted very carefully since
static bright letters might be distracting.   In this case it really
means distraction via movement etc. It was also pointed out that the
purpose of advertisements is to distract.