Re: My Thoughts on User content, 3rd party content and conformance

Hi Gregg,

I was reading your original email as present tense, i.e. wcag2. My misunderstanding, if it’s all in WCAG 3 context that makes sense.

On the points:

GV: 2)  Third party provided parts of a page created by any contractors the author hired to are part of the page   and are covered by WCAG.

I’m not sure anyone is arguing against this, anytime the ‘website owner’ is making a procurement choice (e.g. supplier, library of code, API) that should be part of the site claiming conformance.
I agree with Sheri that it may or may not be a paid thing, but it is where the site owner has made a direct a choice about what to include. (Rather than opening the site to end-users to post things.)

The nature of these things is that they are perceived as part of the site and not authored individually. (So that would include a free or paid display of maps from a service, but not include individual users creating maps to display on the site.)

I guess there might be difficult situations where there are no accessible choices, such as (my experience with) GIS software, but that’s a wider problem with that type of software.


AC: However, once saved and part of the page (for that user and other users), why isn’t that covered?
GV: Because, for one - that would mean that all email providers would have to read your email and make it accessible before delivering it to your recipient.

Ok, I can see problems with personal communications, particularly where the content could be authored by any number of applications and the service must accept and display them.

However, for a social media site which controls the authoring interface and displays the posts to the public, I’m not sure why we would differentiate that?

That’s something we know how to do and is practical today, at least for most content types.

Obviously, someone determined to post inaccessible content will find a way, but when you control the authoring interface there should be a responsibility to encourage accessible content.

In that scenario I think we’d want to have an assertion that they have reviewed the authoring interface and ensured that users are encouraged to create accessible content.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

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@alastc / www.nomensa.com<http://www.nomensa.com>