Google ads accessibility

Hello everyone,

We use the Google ads platform to serve advertisements throughout our website. I have been working on ensuring that we fully support the WCAG criterion 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide<https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/pause-stop-hide.html> and I have encountered an issue with animated google adverts which is making this difficult to achieve. I discovered that there is some indirect support for stopping google. In the top-right corner of ads, there is an option to display “Ad badging<https://support.google.com/displayvideo/answer/3424087?hl=en>”. This includes an “AdChoices” button and a “More options” button (three vertical dots). Clicking on “More options” removes the ad artwork and just displays two buttons, “Send feedback” and “Why this add”. As the ad artwork is no longer displayed, I would consider this fulfilling the requirements for 2.2.2 Pause, Stop, Hide. After digging into the HTML of the ad though, I unfortunately encountered some other issues:

  *
These Ad badging buttons do not have accessible names
  *
Not all of them display a visible focus indicator

It appears Google have chosen not to use semantic elements for building these components, leading to a lack of support for assistive technology. Even if they now pass 2.2.2 Pause Stop, Hide, I am sure they would fail in relation to 4.1.2 Name, Role, Value<https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/name-role-value.html>. I feel like this is a big oversight and so am wandering if anyone else has encountered this and is perhaps aware of any way to fix it? The ads are served in iFrames so manipulating HTML, JS and CSS are not an option.

Below are a couple screenshots to illustrate how the ads appear on IOPscience.

Default display of advertisement:
[Screenshot 2025-10-01 at 13.04.38.png]

After clicking “More options”:
[Screenshot 2025-10-01 at 13.04.45.png]

Please reply to me directly and not to the whole list, so that specific vendor or product information is not discussed on the list.

Thank you.



Jordan Rogers, CPWA

UI Developer and Web Accessibility Specialist



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