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Re: Legacy content recommendation

for

From: Angela French
Date: Aug 26, 2014 12:16PM

Our possibly non-accessible content would be linked to documents such as PDFs and Word docs. What would be the best way to alert users to this ? Do you have any URLs that you could direct me to where this has successfully been done?

Angela French

-----Original Message-----
From: <EMAIL REMOVED> [mailto: <EMAIL REMOVED> ] On Behalf Of Jared Smith
Sent: Tuesday, August 26, 2014 11:12 AM
To: WebAIM Discussion List
Subject: Re: [WebAIM] Legacy content recommendation

You're asking the right questions. We run into this situation often in WebAIM's evaluation and certification work.

If you (or a 3rd party) were to make a WCAG 2.0 conformance claim, you could only claim conformance on the content that is actually conformant, not the archival content. There's no requirement to label or identify the other content itself as being inaccessible or non-conformant. Your suggestion that users could request accessible versions of this content is a great approach for content that is not feasible or logical to make accessible, and in a way identifies it as being archival and not optimized for accessibility.

Much of accessibility is about fighting the right battles and getting the best bang for your buck. From what you have described, it makes much more sense to put your efforts into ensuring accessibility of the new site and new content moving forward than to put significant time and money toward remediating archival content. There may, however, be some site-wide or minor changes you can make to remove significant accessibility barriers for that content.

Jared


On Tue, Aug 26, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Jordan Wilson < <EMAIL REMOVED> > wrote:
> Our agency has a web client we¹re currently working with who is
> starting a large-scale (10k+ page) website redesign and they¹ve chosen
> to build to WCAG 2.0 A and AA.
>
> This particular client has a significant amount of legacy content from
> an existing non-compliant site. That content is not current, but
> outdated such as 2009 financial summaries or archived monthly staff newsletters.
> The content is in the form of flash, PDFs, videos, non-accessible HTML
> etc and goes back 7+ years.
>
> Any content which would be current or vital they are rebuilding as
> part of the new accessible site.
>
> While they have committed to making their new site and current content
> accessible, making that old content accessible represents a
> considerable financial burden for limited utility and they¹re unable
> to commit to doing so financially at this point.
>
> For the sake of brevity, let¹s assume that they can¹t make that legacy
> content accessible. Are there any recommended techniques or acceptable
> practices for indicating or labeling that content as not-accessible?
>
> The same client is also interested in having their new site certified
> by a third party as compliant to demonstrate their commitment to accessibility.
> They¹re undergoing a significant redesign and content creation effort
> to make their web presence accessible.
>
> My worry is whether leaving this legacy content on the site would make
> accessibility certification a non-starter. Has anyone had any similar
> experiences? Are there any recommendations to handle it properly? Is
> leaving legacy content inaccessible ever acceptable?
>
> One idea we discussed was to provide a form or contact option which
> would allow users to request an accessible version of a specific
> inaccessible asset as necessary.
>
> Thanks for your help/insight,
>
> Jordan Wilson
>
>
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