Safe Content Review
Group: animation-and-movement • Guideline: avoid-physical-harm
Summary in Plain English
An organisational assertion, not a technical check: the organisation states that it has reviewed its content for violent, explicit or distressing material and warned people before they reach it. The assertion has to name who made it and when the review happened.
Why It Matters
Encountering distressing content without warning can trigger trauma responses, and people who need to prepare for or avoid such material cannot do so if nothing signals it is coming.
Scope: When This Applies
The draft's own conditions, quoted from guidelines/groups/animation-and-movement/avoid-physical-harm/safe-content-review.md.
Notes in the draft
Troubling content will vary based on culture or individual situations, and reviews should take target audiences into consideration.
Test Procedure from the W3C Draft
Upstream has a test heading for this provision but has not written the procedure yet, and no test steps have been written here. Generic advice would apply to almost any provision, so none is shown.
W3C Working Group Status
The draft records no open editors' notes on this provision.
W3C Threads on This Provision
2 GitHub threads carrying 12 comments, fetched from w3c/wcag3 by the tracker. Titles, numbers and states are the threads' own.
What the Argument Is About
Whether content-level properties that are not discrete triggers — the mood a piece of content creates, the storylines woven through it — can ever be pinned down well enough to be an outcome, or whether they belong to future assistive technology instead.
Positions taken in the thread
Disturbing Content and Triggers only catch acute, identifiable items, but content can create a mood with nothing in it that flags as a trigger. SuzanneKTaylor's proposed outcome (#88) is that information about the mood content is likely to encourage is available or can be changed or selected by the user, aimed at long-form content — a movie, a television show, an ebook, a VR experience — where a user managing anxiety would benefit from knowing before committing. medeaoblongata frames the same gap as connotative content, distinct from denotative and from purely decorative, and notes that a detailed description can kill the effect it describes, since the sinister or the erotic is often about what goes unmentioned, so flagging a connotation in lieu of a description has value.
detlevhfischer's objection is that mood is not a property of content but depends on the user and on surrounding context, and that annotation would have to be exposed both visually and programmatically for equity, adding more material to the sea of content and increasing cognitive load for people it does not help — he does not see how this becomes a general measurable outcome. ericwbailey says it would be impossible to quantify before cultural variation is even factored in. patrickhlauke's concern is downstream: he dreads auditors having to check this kind of meta-information when judging conformance.
Issue #89 proposes that individual storylines be programmatically distinguishable, or that users can choose storylines. The argument is that hiding individual items leaves the surrounding context intact and so does not actually protect the user, while interwoven plots also tax memory and the ability to distinguish characters, locations and times. Her worked example is a video cutting between three people's stories in ten-minute and then five-minute blocks: being able to watch or skip one full story handles some subtle triggers by a simple mechanism rather than by content judgement.
GreggVan argues no content can be written that triggers nobody — depending on personal history, a grove of trees could be a trigger — and that the group risks a never-ending discussion of what counts, so an AI filter that detects and redacts per the individual is the better place for it. SuzanneKTaylor partly agrees and extends it: if these outcomes live in AT, WCAG's remaining concern is whether that AT has the access it needs to pre-screen, which is a question about whether it can traverse a whole movie or gets stopped at the first ad. She adds that she personally thinks new AT is needed for many of the outcomes.
The counter to GreggVan's AI filter is that the profile it needs is itself hazardous: asking a user to enumerate their triggers could be more triggering than the content, and a leaked profile could be used for serious harm — her example is a politician whose debate opponents obtain a copy. Her conclusion is that simple and common triggers, of the do-not-show-spiders-in-this-game kind, are addressable now, and outcomes may have to stay at that basic level until more is known.
Agreed
- Connotation annotations on images and alt text — the separate idea Brennan raised, not the mood metadata for long-form content — should surface through a user agent, OS or screen reader setting the user has turned on, not by default. detlevhfischer asked whether that would avoid adding noise and SuzanneKTaylor said yes; he noted many users will never discover the setting.
- There is a grey area between mood and content that some people treat as a trigger — detlevhfischer raised it and it went unchallenged.
- Author-intended connotation is more tractable than user-experienced mood. SuzanneKTaylor concedes ericwbailey's point on her own proposal, since one reader finds a hardship story depressing and another finds it a call to action, and says that would need calibrating by the user inside AT.
Still open
- Whether mood can be scoped into anything a conformance claim could be assessed against — detlevhfischer's question of where to stop is unanswered.
- Whether AT could evaluate long-form content end to end, which is SuzanneKTaylor's own open question.
- Whether storyline selection (#89) is worth pursuing at all. GreggVan's AI-filter response is the only substantive reply, and he was answering the trigger framing rather than the storyline mechanism.
Note
Both issues were filed by SuzanneKTaylor on the same day in 2024 in response to the May 2024 draft's call for missing outcomes, and both are thin. #89 has drawn two comments in over two years and no pushback on the storyline proposal itself; the discussion below is mostly #88, and the working group has not responded formally in either thread.
WCAG 2.2 Criteria That Map Here
From this site's reviewed WCAG 2.2 → WCAG 3 map. The map is an interpretation, not a W3C mapping: W3C has not published one yet.
No mapping recorded. No WCAG 2.2 criterion in this site's map is recorded as a predecessor of this provision.
W3C Raw Source Text
Verbatim from guidelines/groups/animation-and-movement/avoid-physical-harm/safe-content-review.md · informative document: informative/guidelines/animation-and-movement/avoid-physical-harm/safe-content-review.md
[Title, role, or organization] asserts that: * We have reviewed content for violent, explicit, or troubling content and provided appropriate warnings before accessing the content. ::assertion-required - title, role, or organization making the assertion (if different from the conformance claim) - date of when the review was conducted - date of assertion (if different from the date of the conformance claim) :::note Troubling content will vary based on culture or individual situations, and reviews should take target audiences into consideration. :::