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Re: Accessibility a external content

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From: glen walker
Date: Mar 30, 2022 2:55PM

From a CYA perspective, I've seen lots of companies link to external
content and have a confirmation dialog popup that says "you are leaving our
site, we don't know how accessible the site you're going to is", or
something like that.

It gets tricky when you embed content. Technically, the entire page must
conform, including embedded content, in order to say the page conforms.
There's a note about embedded content in the conformance section of WCAG.

https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG21/#h-note-31

It essentially says you can claim "partial" conformance if embedded content
is not accessible. I'm not sure what "partial" conformance means when it
comes to the legal aspect. If you have a 100% conformant site except for
the embedded content, can you be sued? Given that anyone can be sued at
any time for any reason, the answer is likely "yes". Would the lawsuit
hold up in court or would it be dismissed. I think only a judge could
answer that.

From a VPAT perspective, you can claim "supports" for any content that you
create that is conformant and "partially supports" or "does not support"
for content that is not conformant. So, for example, if you have videos
that you create yourself and they are captioned and transcripted, but you
also have embedded video content from others that is not captioned, you'd
claim "partially supports" in the VPAT (because some videos conform and
some do not). If you don't have any videos that you create yourself and
the only videos come from embedded content and they're not captioned, then
it would be "does not support" because there aren't any videos that have
captioning.

From a UX perspective, embedded content is usually a better experience.
From a conformance or legal perspective, whether you should have embedded
content is a hard question to answer. Lots of factors come into play. How
risk averse are you? How accessible is the content? Is the content
provider amenable to accessibility concerns/suggestions. Is the content
totally out of the content providers control such as author driven
content? Does the content provider follow ATAG for the authoring content?