Glossary · Accessibility term
Partial conformance
A statement of partial conformance is what you publish when a page fails only because of content outside your control, such as user comments, an ad slot, or a third-party widget you cannot repair. It is a statement of non-conformance rather than a conformance claim with a carve-out, and the sentence you are given to write opens "This page does not conform". What follows is the level the page would reach if the named parts were removed. WCAG has two of these statements. One covers third-party content, and the other covers a page that would conform if accessibility support existed for the language it is written in. Neither one covers content you chose to embed and could replace.
In practice
WCAG gives two routes here and most people know one. Either monitor the third-party content and repair anything non-conforming within two business days, in which case you can claim conformance outright. Or publish the statement, naming the parts you do not control clearly enough that a user can tell which parts you mean. Then keep asking the supplier to fix theirs.
Both routes have a condition people miss. If you cannot monitor or cannot correct, the monitoring route shuts and takes any conformance claim with it. The statement route is still open, because it never claimed conformance in the first place. What that route asks is a counterfactual. Take the named parts away and would the page conform. So a widget that traps the keyboard can be named in the statement, as long as removing it leaves a page that passes. And "all parts that we do not control" is not a description, unless those parts are clearly marked as such on the page.
There is a second statement for a different problem. Where a page would conform if any assistive technology supported the language it is written in, you say that instead, and there is no monitoring alternative and no clock attached to it. That one turns on the state of the assistive technology market rather than on anything you did.
Both are honest labels rather than loopholes. Content you chose and could replace is not outside your control, whoever wrote it.
Why it matters
Almost every real site embeds something, and you cannot scope the problem out, because conformance is judged on whole pages. Without these two statements the honest answer would be that nobody conforms, which helps nobody. It is also where organisations overclaim, usually by treating the statement as a conformance claim with an exception bolted on.
What the statement actually says
A page carrying an embedded third-party booking widget you cannot repair gets a statement reading that the page does not conform, but would conform at Level AA if the booking widget were removed. That is the whole sentence, and it names the widget so a reader can tell which part is meant. A page using a third-party carousel it could swap for an accessible one gets nothing, because that carousel was a choice.
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Related terms
Knowing the word is the easy part.
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