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

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.

---

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>
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 But we can’t keep referring back to outdated documents like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://accessibility.civicactions.com
> http://twitter.com/mgifford |  http://linkedin.com/in/mgifford
>
>

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