Re: For content to be accessible should it inform if what you are interacting with is an ad or not ad

That would be a 1.1.1 or use of colour violation but my initial gut reaction was that, if there’s no signalling of an ad to users visually then it’s not a fail to not signal it to AT users. And if they are annoying enough to push ad content that way I suspect they won’t differentiate it for anyone.

You could argue that it is much harder for those on the spectrum or with cognitive impairments to differentiate than the general populace but I don’t think that’s a failure – just shitty UI.

Kevin

From: bryan rasmussen <rasmussen.bryan@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, 16 August 2022 at 9:34 PM
To: Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk>
Cc: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org <w3c-wai-ig@w3.org>
Subject: Re: For content to be accessible should it inform if what you are interacting with is an ad or not ad
yeah but sometimes you have visually identifiable differences that you have not made clear in your accessibility tree, that is what I suppose would be the main case - and in that case can you argue well sighted users can see that is an Ad but blind users of a screen reader have no clue.


Kevin Prince  
Product Accessibility & Usability Consultant
 
  
Foster Moore 
A Teranet Company 
  
 
E kevin.prince@fostermoore.com 
Christchurch 
fostermoore.com 
On Tue, Aug 16, 2022 at 11:18 AM Patrick H. Lauke <redux@splintered.co.uk<mailto:redux@splintered.co.uk>> wrote:
On 16/08/2022 09:48, bryan rasmussen wrote:

> This just came up on an Hacker News discussion - if some platform has ad
> content and non ad content together (specific discussion referenced
> FaceBook) and a screen reader user cannot tell the difference between
> the two is that an accessibility issue?
>
> By which I mean, yes of course it is an issue but would you be able to
> file a claim against the people mixing content and ads in this way and
> force them to clearly delineate the two (because of violating
> accessibility standards)

My gut feeling on this would be no, noting that mixing ad content into a
page in a way that doesn't immediately make it clear it's an ad rather
than part of the content itself can be a problem for all users (not
specifically AT users, keyboard users, etc).

Of course, this will depend exactly on the situation, with all other
things being equal (i.e. 1.3.1 Info and Relationships, 2.4.4 Link
Purpose (In Context), and so on being satisfied). You could, at a
stretch, look at 1.3.6 Identify Purpose (AAA), but there's no clear
"right" way to identify a region that is intended to be a ad content.
Possibly also under 1.3.1 looking at perhaps marking up ad content as an
<aside>, but it's not really a strong enough case I'd say to fail
something if it doesn't do this.

P
--
Patrick H. Lauke

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