Comments on: Accessible WYSIWYG editors part 1 – The problem

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 00:33:06 +0000

Hi Peter,

I wish I had seen your article earlier, I may have covered some similar territory.

Still, I hope exploring the potential solutions/interfaces has helped.

I’ve been looking mostly at FCKeditor, TinyMCE & Xstandard so far, are they a representative bunch?

By: Peter Krantz

Peter Krantz — Thu, 30 Nov 2006 22:21:39 +0000

I had a look at some basic accessibility issues with some of the more commonly found WYSIWYG editors in the article Evaluation of WYSIWYG-editors back in March. From the discussion it sounded like many of the developers were about to include more accessibility features in their editor components. I am looking forward to your forthcomning posts in this area. I really hope you find that they have progressed in some way.

By: dotjay

dotjay — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 11:58:10 +0000

Alastair, I agree with you. Why should anybody learn another syntax? But then, how do you provide formatting without it? That’s of course considering tha possibility that JavaScript is not available. The only way I can think of doing it is through a flexible form-based system where you build a page based on form controls added at a user’s request depending on how they want a page built (I hope that makes some kind of sense – sorry, I didn’t explain it very well).

I’ve recently seen a JavaScript editor that’s pretty good at going back to basics, using simple formatting only. But I seem to remember that it still requires the user to build a heirarchy of headings. I like the idea of relative heirarchy building and letting a CMS figure out what level of it should be.

Looking forward to posts to follow.

By: AlastairC

AlastairC — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 08:57:05 +0000

Thanks, I know it’s an issue for many people.

Unfortunately, I don’t think the best textile interface is easy enough for all. Why should people using a screen reader, with keyboard only access, or with cognitive issues have to remember a particular syntax, or have to upload images separately?

I don’t think it’s impossible to create a good WYSIWYG editor, but the people creating them try to do too much, adding too much functionality that requires inline markup. I hope to spec out how that should work. It’s going to be more than three posts though! (Slight change of plan.)

By: dotjay

dotjay — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 00:20:40 +0000

Nice intro to the series. This is something I think many of us have thought about for some time now.

I reckon that a perfect solution is probably nigh on impossible. However, something I’ve been wanting to do is provide a fallback syntax that’s fairly easy to learn (something like Textile or Markdown) and use JavaScript to provide a WYSIWYG preview of the content.

Rich Pedley’s already done a good job using Markdown:
http://www.quirm.net/category.php?id=20

Another part of me says that why find a replacement for HTML’s job?