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Techniques for Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines 1.0

Section 1: Support accessible authoring practices

Editors of this section:: Jan Richards; Charles McCathieNevile

ATAG Checkpoint 1.1: Ensure that the author can produce accessible content in the markup language(s) supported by the tool. [Priority 1]

Techniques:

Ensure the tool supports all the structural features of the supported languages.
Allow the author to directly edit the source markup (so knowledgeable authors can ensure accessible content).
When an extended (superset) or simplified (subset) markup language is supported, ensure that the accessibility features in the base language are still available.
Allow the addition of equivalent alternatives for all supported image formats that allow text content, including PNG, SVG, WebCGM, JPEG, and GIF.
Enable the author to produce metadata that can be used to construct an accessible version of the output. For example, when producing image formats that do not allow the inclusion of alternative information within them, use Dublin Core metadata to incorporate description, title information, or "foaf" metadata to identify people depicted in images.
Notify the author, if a given output format is not accessible (so they can decide to use a different format).

Reference:

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 WCAG10 and Techniques (Full, Core, HTML, CSS).
Language specific accessibility notes: CSS, SMIL, HTML4, SVG, XML languages.

ATAG Checkpoint 1.2: Ensure that the tool preserves all accessibility information during authoring, transformations, and conversions. [Priority 1]

Techniques:

This checkpoint covers systems that digest documents and reconstitute them in standardized formats.
Ensure that the tool preserves all the elements and attributes defined in the relevant specification(s) even if it is unable to render them in a publishing view or preview mode.
Allow the author to decide whether or not to preserve unrecognized markup (since it might be related to accessibility). See ATAG 4.3.
Consider explaining automatic changes made by the tool to the author.
Allow authors to edit document conversion templates to specify the way presentation conventions should be converted into structural markup.
Ensure that changes to a document's graphical layout do not reduce readability when rendered serially. For example, confirm the linearized reading order with the author.
Some examples of conversion best practice include:
- Avoid transforming text into images. Use style sheets for presentation control, or use an XML application such as Scalable Vector Graphics [SVG] that keeps the text as text. If this is not possible, ensure that the text is available as equivalent text for the image.
- When importing images with associated descriptions into a markup document, make the descriptions available through appropriate markup.
- When transforming a table to a list or list of lists, ensure that table headings are transformed into headings and that summary or caption information is retained as rendered content.
- When converting linked elements (i.e. footnotes, endnotes, call-outs, annotations, references, etc.) provide them as inline content or maintain two-way linking.
- When converting from an unstructured word-processor format to markup, ensure that headings and list items are transformed into appropriate structural markup (appropriate level of heading or type of list, etc.).
- When generating a natural language translation of text, produce the simplest and clearest possible use of the new language.

ATAG Checkpoint 1.3: Ensure that when the tool automatically generates markup it conforms to the W3C's Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [WCAG10]. [Relative Priority]

Techniques:

Ensure that when the tool automatically generates content and markup (e.g. the author has not specifically specified the markup to be used), that markup conforms to the following WCAG10 checkpoints. (Note: An asterix (*) denotes those WCAG checkpoints that involve the inclusion of equivalent alternative information. For these WCAG checkpoints, see ATAG 3.4 for restrictions on automatically generating equivalent alternatives and ATAG 3.1 for prompting guidance) :

ATAG Checkpoint 1.4: Ensure that templates provided by the tool conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 [WCAG10]. [Relative Priority]

Techniques:

For tools that allow authors to create their own templates, advise the author that templates should be held to a high accessibility standard, since they will be repeatedly reused. Help the author reach this goal by making an accessibility check mandatory before saving as a template.
Ensure that all templates provided by the tool conform to the following WCAG10 checkpoints :
The following WCAG10 checkpoints are not considered relevant to this checkpoint:
- WCAG 11.4 (P1) Keep alternative pages synchronized with original pages. (This checkpoint not relevant because it refers to a worst case scenario that templates should not encourage

Samples:

The following are examples of accessible templates (Note: not all the features of these templates are supported by all browsers):

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