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Re: Auto-refreshing advertisements

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From: Hayman, Douglass
Date: Jan 19, 2024 9:10AM

Barry,

Good questions. My thoughts are that any be it advertisements or internal audio/video clips, these should be under the control of the web site visitor to pause or stop to meet the intent of the accessibility guidelines. Obviously, the advertisers want to be in our face over and over again.

The only thing I can imagine being legit in providing a web visitor with refreshed content that they don't control would be perhaps a tornado warning or a lockdown message about a shooter on the premises.

I'd looked into what overlays claimed to do to stop motion and one that I checked out seem to merely take a screenshot of the page and present the user with that static image. That would be fine if the user had no vision impairment. Or perhaps new versions would do quick and accurate optical character recognition and properly layout the structure, providing access to all of the content, free of moving images and unwanted sounds.

Looking just now at a local Seattle news site and a national news site, both load with a video player going. The sound is fortunately muted by default on both. But tabbing to go to the player is not within the first 20 or 30 tab clicks. Loading NVDA screen reader, one site has landmarks and lands on the video player, the other does not. Both fail due to having movement that one can't tab to and stop within what, 3? 5? Tab clicks?

A colleague who uses a screen reader full time commented on how some paywalled news sites work fine for him. The pop-up blocking a view of the article is no impediment for him. And perhaps the visually distracting ad that bugs the sighted user but is muted, is no problem for the screen reading user. But what about the person using a sip and puff switch to navigate a web site, or the speech recognition using person with a spinal cord injury?



Doug Hayman
IT Accessibility Coordinator
Information Technology
Olympic College
<EMAIL REMOVED>
(360) 475-7632