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Re: Personalized user experiences

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From: Steve Green
Date: May 14, 2020 6:45PM

I don't see anything that would constitute a WCAG non-conformance. The only success criteria that are even remotely relevant are 3.2.3 (Consistent Navigation) and 3.2.4 (Consistent Identification), but you don't appear to be violating those.

Steve Green
Managing Director
Test Partners Ltd


-----Original Message-----
From: WebAIM-Forum < <EMAIL REMOVED> > On Behalf Of Myron To
Sent: 14 May 2020 23:30
To: <EMAIL REMOVED>
Subject: [WebAIM] Personalized user experiences

I've been trying to research if there is any guideline that would tell me whether or not the following is a failure or not.

My company has designed and built a career website that customizes its homepage based on the user's job search behavior on the site. That is, if we find that a job seeker on our site has searched for and viewed a nursing category job, we assume that person is interested in a nursing career and cookie that user's browser so that if the user clicks on the home link in the main navigation, the user is presented with an alternate homepage that contains nursing career information, instead of generic career information, which is presented on our default/non-personalized homepage. However, in reality, the cookie tells the browser to redirect to an alternate homepage (different URL). The personalized nursing homepage template is very similar to the default homepage, but the contents, such as text and images, now present nursing-oriented text and graphics.

I imagine this could be disorienting for some because if there was something specific on the default homepage that the user wanted to see again, the user wouldn't be able to find it because it's not on this redirected page URL. And the user is likely not to notice that the URL changed or that the user had been redirected to an alternate homepage.

Does this scenario present a WCAG failure? If so, which guideline can I reference as an argument to my team?

If the URL did not change or redirect to another page, and we simply used a show/hide condition to swap out images and text, would that pass? I think of how Amazon customizes their homepage experience based on my past shopping behavior in order to entice me to buy other similar items, but their URL doesn't change. Would this type of scenario be acceptable or is it still disorienting and considered a failure?

Thank you for your input!

*Myron To*
Director, Program Management
m: +1.360.702.9411
<EMAIL REMOVED>

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