Posted by izmeez on August 14, 2009 at 10:52am
Here is the post from drupal.org that I mentioned at the Surrey meetup yesterday. In the comment a Drupal user states he is blind and that TinyMCE is the best editor for blind people because of it's accessibility.
http://drupal.org/node/241753#comment-1593072
Izzy
Comments
wow i'm really surprised to
wow i'm really surprised to hear that - i can see how the output is better, but for inputting i would have thought it'd be a lot more challenging than plain text to navigate for all the styles, interesting...
Thank you for posting this!
Thank you for posting this! I've cross-posted this to the Accessibility group.
surprised too
How many editors has he tried? Also, there is a problem with generalizing from one user -- blind people have as wide a range of preferences and abilities as other groups. So, I think we still need to formalize the evaluation of all these tools.
BTW, will D7 have its own editor? I'm not up to speed on these things.
An older evaluation
A couple of years ago there was an excellent post on Standards Schmandards about WYSIWYG editor accessibility. It's still valuable, though a bit dated now. TinyMCE came out pretty well at the time (15/19), but the only editor which got a perfect score was XStandard. That's unfortunate, because it's also the only one which requires an extra browser plugin to work.
Of course, there are two things to consider when thinking about WYSIWYG editor accessibility. One is the accessibility of the HTML it produces -- is the generated code clear when read aloud by a screen reader like NVDA, JAWS, or FireVox? That's what the Standards Schmandards post was evaluating, and is probably the more important aspect.
The other is the accessibility of the WYSIWYG interface -- can it be used by a blind user with a screen reader? Obviously, there are some circumstances where this is a moot point. For example, if the site is configured for use as, say, a departmental web site which doesn't allow public comment, and none of the editors need a screen reader, then whether the WYSIWYG works with one is irrelevant.
If you've got a lot of public input on a site, though, it's definitely an issue. So it's worth noting that the TinyMCE people also have an example on configuring TinyMCE controls for compatibility with screen readers. I'd like it better with a little more narrative discussing how it's supposed to work, but at least it shows they're thinking about the issue.
D8 Considerations
This will become more of a consideration when thinking about getting a WYSIWYG in core in Drupal 8. Here's what they say for themselves on this subject:
http://ckeditor.com/blog/CKEditor_and_WAI-ARIA_means_Usable_Accessibility
http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/Accessability
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OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide
spelling
This is indeed the correct link. It's a bit concerning, don't you think, that they can't spell it? :P
Lack of Help
That is definitely not a good sign...
I was thinking about this also because of this thread about BUEditor & d.o:
http://drupal.org/node/1306752#comment-5113780
I do hope that BUEditor moves over to g.d.o, but I was poking around on other WYSIWYG editors to see what they provide under the '?' link. The big two have them but only provide version numbers & related software.
Frankly, most folk don't know or care what version of what WYSIWYG they are using. A '?' button should be labeled basically like BUEditor does, except that it should be expanded to include information about what key combinations you press to to activate them.
I couldn't find one that clearly stated what the accelerator keys (keyboard shortcuts) were and how to use them. They had them but were hidden.
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OpenConcept | Twitter @mgifford | Drupal Security Guide
WYSIWYG accessibility status quo
What is the status quo of WYSIWYG use by users with disabilities? Do content authors who have a vision impairment generally prefer to use a WYSIWYG or hand code their HTML tags? What about keyboard-only content authors?
Anyone have any recent statistics or even personal anecdotes?
I'm wondering how much energy we should all be putting into making these WYSIWYGs accessible and how we will do that if/when a WYSIWYG comes into Drupal core.
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