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

Hi Wilco,

Many thanks for this excellent summary! I’ve been following this thread and think it’s very relevant/helpful to the subgroup. I believe most of these aspects flow nicely into the individual use cases we already documented, and reinforces the idea of breaking down the term “third-party content” into specific situations. It’s not really only about the content but also about the context – who publishes what and where.

Regards,
  Shadi

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Shadi Abou-Zahra
Amazon Devices and Services
Principal Accessibility Standards and Policy Manager
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From: Wilco Fiers <wilco.fiers@deque.com>
Sent: Thursday, 25 May, 2023 12:35 PM
To: w3c-waI-gl@w3. org <w3c-wai-gl@w3.org>
Subject: RE: [EXTERNAL]My Thoughts on User content, 3rd party content and conformance


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Hey folks,
I was asked to write a summary of this email thread (so far) and pass that along to the Guidance for policy makers subgroup. I'm sharing this here too as it might be useful for people who may find long e-mail threads difficult to follow.

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When it comes to sites serving up content that wasn't generated by the site owner (third-party content), there seems to be general agreement that in some, but not all cases the content creator is primarily responsible for the accessibility of that content, rather than the site owner.

- Was the content purchased by the site owner?
- Is the site owner selecting which content to publish, or is it a public forum?
- How is the third-party content frames, and is it altered in some way?
- Does the site owner enable / encourage third-party content providers to write accessible content?
- When authoring tools are provided to users, do they conform to ATAG?
- Does the site owner check the accessibility of third-party content to drive improvement?

Some in the thread mention that (some of) these questions are policy questions, which puts them out of scope for WCAG 3 directly, but useful to be considered in a guidance document for policy makers.

On Wed, May 24, 2023 at 9:30 PM Mike Gifford <mike.gifford@civicactions.com<mailto:mike.gifford@civicactions.com>> wrote:
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://civicactions.com/>    |  https://accessibility.civicactions.com

http://twitter.com/mgifford |  http://linkedin.com/in/mgifford



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Wilco Fiers
Axe-core & Axe-linter product owner - WCAG 3 Project Manager - Facilitator ACT Task Force
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