[thelist] Accessibility and (browser-based) wysiwyg editors

[Rob Schumann]

Hi,

I'm constructing a small CMS and have been toying with how to handle in text style changes by the client editing their site content through whatever the given interface turns out to be.

The choice seems simple:

Develop my own simplified tagging system and allow editing through the standard <input> and <textarea> tags

Use one of the wysiwyg offerings that are beginning to appear

Dump everything and move over to a blog

I don't have very much experience of the wysiwyg browser based editors, largely because I run/develop on a Mac, thus precluding the use of the vast majority of those available.... so the opinion formed here is necessarily based upon a very limited sample, however...

The principal of these editors appears GREAT from the client point of view, since they look and work like the word processors everyone is used to, so would likely be greeted with great enthusiasm in that quarter.

But what about accessibility and the need for the html generated to carry structural meaning as opposed to merely affecting affect appearance (which should anyway be the task of css).... from this perspective these same wysiwyg editors would appear to be a giant step backwards... certainly there should be some caveats to their use.

Gone is the use of <H#> tags, gone are <em>, <strong> and a host of others... What we are left with are <p> tags and changes to font face, colour, weight, size and style, and perhaps the ability to add lists and tables.

So, as the groundswell towards accessibility gathers momentum and becomes a legal necessity in some countries, along comes a tool with the potential to significantly hobble that evolution... I know that I can impose some structure on the page by breaking the content down into sections within the databased and styling those separately using structural tags... but these editors allow the client to write lengthy texts that, while potentially visually ok, contain not a single structural tag beyond <p>.

At the moment and for my own purposes I am tending towards developing my own simplified tagging system (unless someone can point me to one that can be easily plugged into a different working environment). Those of you with greater experience on the available wysiwyg editors might like to take issue with my above concerns... I would love that I am wrong...

Regards


Rob