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My website contains links to third-party websites, mostly articles on news websites. If these third-party websites are not accessible, and I am trying to meet WCAG 2.0/2.1 AA standards, do these links make my site inaccessible?

Any answers supported by WCAG are greatly appreciated.

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Merely providing links to an inaccessible site does not make your own site inaccessible. A conformance claim only covers the site (domain or subdomain) for which the owner claims conformance; it does not require you to fix the rest of the web.

However, if linking means embedding content from other websites, that external content can cause accessibility issues. In a regular WCAG conformance claim, you cannot exclude this external content; conformance claims are for full pages. For such scenarios, you may wish to provide a Statement of Partial Conformance - Third Party Content.

Another scenario is where an online shop uses an external payment process. If the buying process begins on your own site but requires the use of an external payment services to complete the purchase, that external part must also be considered when making a conformance claim. This is covered by the section Complete processes in WCAG 2.1.

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    Thank you, user800. By 'embedding content from other websites', I imagine you are referring to iFrames or similar?
    – ZEST
    Oct 17, 2019 at 16:45
  • @ZEST iframes would be one way of doing this. Simple using images that are hosted elsewhere (e.g. animated GIFs) would also count.
    – Tsundoku
    Oct 17, 2019 at 16:46
  • Thank you for the clarification, much appreciated!
    – ZEST
    Oct 17, 2019 at 16:49

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