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

HI All,

Good to see the discussion here on 3rd party content & conformance. I do
think it is an important one.

One thing that is clear is that if we do not have some accountability for
3rd parties, then we’re not going to see accessibility improve. The web is
already very intertwined, and becoming increasingly so. Publishers have a
lot more power than editors, or for that matter any 3rd party that the site
owner chooses to use.

To quote your friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man, "With great power comes
great responsibility”.

*ATAG 2.0*

Chaals, absolutely with ATAG 2.0 needing an update. Would have been much
more sensible to simply hard-code ATAG 2.0 to have said that it should
follow the latest recommended WCAG release. That would help make it
evergreen. I’d really love to see a “latest AIA recommendation” approach
taken more broadly. With legislation, perhaps it should come with a 6 month
review process. But we can’t keep referring back to outdated documents like
WCAG 2.0 (which was released 18 months after the first iPhone).

*Author experience*

John, totally hear you on content creators ignoring help. Frankly though
I’ve seen very few efforts to implement ATAG - Part B. Drupal’s made some
efforts, but frankly most of our clients don’t really care about the
authoring side of things. The authoring experience is always the red-headed
step child. Was great connecting with other CMS developers with the
We4Authors Cluster https://accessibilitycluster.com/main-results - the main
results are pretty straight forward. This is the only cross-CMS author
experience research project on accessibility I think has ever been done. We
touched on a few issues, but frankly missed some of the items that Jon
Dunderson built into https://a11yfirst.gitlab.io/ with CKEditor 4. All of
that work was left as an optional plugin, and has yet to be upgraded to
CKEditor 5 (let alone built into the CKEditor core by default).

It’s really quite a lot easier to make sites accessible if all you give
your authors is plain text or Markdown. We choose to give authors more
tools, and they will mis-use them. We can’t expect authors to be
accessibility experts. But the site owner makes choices which then affect
the editor experience which then affects the ultimate accessibility of the
site in question.

Most sites aren’t like big social media sites, but even there so much can
be done with shaping the authoring experiences. If
Twitter/Facebook/Instagram/LinkedIN were to not only include the ability to
add alt text for images, but to actively promote social posts where there
is alt text, we’d see a lot more alt text. We know what many folks will do
for SEO. We know Google is promoting sites that they see are quality sites.
Not including accessibility in post rankings is a choice, and it has
implications. The publishers can shape the incentives for the authors.
Publishers have a great deal of control over how they manage the authoring
interface.

*Maps & terrains*

Site owners should have responsibility to prove progress towards
perfection. We’re never going to reach perfection, but it should be
possible to demonstrate that strategic efforts are being made to improve
the experience for everyone. I don’t think that publishers should be
responsible for a full evaluation of alt text quality, but I do think that
having a basic quality check on alt text isn’t too much to ask.  Even just
searching for "image*.jpg" would be a start. That is something that really
should be common, but sadly isn’t (Drupal doesn’t have this yet either for
those who are wondering).

Having an accessibility statement with a monitored feedback loop is
something that can also go a great ways. WCAG is a map, the experience of
users with disabilities is the terrain. We can embed testable
best-practices in a document like WCAG, but that is just a guide to
producing an accessible user experience. WAI has tried to make it as
relevant & useful as we can, but it is just a map to better experiences.
Publishers need to be listening to users with disabilities.

*Distributing responsibility*

Wendy, thanks for your points. Having a sense of what 3rd parties, and who
is behind them is important. We should expect more from big vendors than we
do from individual contributors. Both can provide material that is
understood to be 3rd party content. I’m glad that you see the your
publishing service to have responsibility to help content creators create
accessible content. I do think that too much of the concern of 3rd
party/user generated content is tied to a fear of the work that is required
to achieve perfection.

Having scanned hundreds of thousands of government web sites, I am able to
report that even the government is a long, long way from perfection. It is
a bit baffling how many errors some big government sites have, that are
frankly critical to engaging with citizens. Government needs to do a lot
better, as does everyone else, but I do feel that this obsession with
eliminating all accessibility issues may be stopping us from progressing on
building an increasingly inclusive digital world.

I am part of the W3C’s SustyWeb Community Group -
https://www.w3.org/community/sustyweb/ - I like your all to distribute
responsibility. With carbon accounting, a big challenge comes with Scope 3
emissions. From a CO2 perspective, Scope 3 has a much bigger impact on
procurement and product life-cycle, than either Scope 1 or 2. Driving
change requires vendors with more sustainable products being more
commercially viable.

Distributing responsibility to the authors by building in tools like
https://editoria11y.princeton.edu/ is one way to do this. VPAT was
innovative 20 years ago. Hopefully we’ll see tools like
https://gsa.github.io/openacr-editor support digital inclusion in projects
moving ahead.

*Conclusion*

This email has gone on much too long. I do want to acknowledge Gregg for
raising this, and the contributions of Jon, Corey & Alistair.

Web technologies are far more complicated than they were when WCAG 1.0 was
being developed. That said, simple page based approaches to web
accessibility are probably more relevant to the web of 1999 than they are
to the web of today. Almost nobody is hand-coding HTML from scratch, and
the systems that build most of the web mean that we are going to have to
have a more nuanced strategy to addressing accessibility issues.

Mike


Mike Gifford, Senior Strategist, CivicActions
Drupal Core Accessibility Maintainer
https://civicactions.com    |  https://accessibility.civicactions.com
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