[Athen] Accessibility Policies and External Content

[Christopher Phillips]

Hello everyone –
We are finalizing some campus accessibility policies and we are struggling with how the policy should cover linking or embedding inaccessible content on public sites.

If we are creating/hosting a video or document then clearly our accessibility standards would apply to it. However, it gets a little tricky when considering content created by or hosted by others and whether we link to or embed that content. I would love any feedback or thoughts from the list as we work through a couple of challenges:


  1.  Part of the discussion is how we share the information – for example if I link to another website I may consider if it is accessible, but we would not require that websites only link to accessible sites. However, if I embedded a page from another site on my own site – is that different? It is still hosted by someone else, but it feels like embedded site/document/video may have a higher expectation that a linked site/document/video. Is there a substantial difference in expectation for something that is linked vs embedded?
  2.  If we did have a standard for embedded content, but not linked content – there is some concern that some groups might use that to get around captioning a video by linking to it instead of embedding it, even when embedding it might be the better user experience.

I would love to hear from anyone who has worked through how they address this type of content in any guidelines or standards.

Thank you!
--
Christopher Phillips
Electronic and Information Technology Accessibility Coordinator
Center for Innovative Design and Instruction
Utah State University
https://www.usu.edu/accessibility/
435-797-5535
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman12.u.washington.edu/pipermail/athen-list/attachments/20220329/a37aef29/attachment.html>