Thread Subject: Authoring Tools

From: Andi Snow-Weaver
Date: Tue, Apr 10 2007 4:05 PM

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Getting back to Allen's proposal for a provision specific to authoring
tools:

Allen's original proposal on March 5th [1] was:

When software allows creation of, or modification to information stored in
a specific set of encoding formats, all accessibility attributes contained
in those formats must be available to the author, and programmatic
assessment and remediation of those attributes must be provided to expedite
such creation or modification.

We discussed it at both the March 7th [2] and 14th [3] meetings.

The discussion summaries are quite long but I believe these are the major
points:

- We need a definition of content that addresses Web content, e-mail, and
office software documents
- We should use the W3C definition of authoring tool - Any software or
collection of software components used to create or modify web content for
publication.
- Requiring the creation software to provide the assessment function is too
restrictive. Software is available to do automated assessments and so this
function does not have to be built into every authoring tool.
- Authoring tools should not delete or alter any accessibility attributes
that are already in the content (in the case of editing existing content)
- Content production often involves several steps, with different tools
being used in each step. May be too restrictive to require every tool in
the process to provide the authoring function proposed above. The
collection of tools must support ATAG or whatever requirements are defined
in 508.
- Content management systems need to be included
- What approaches would be incentives for vendors to produce tools that
create accessible content?

So .... here's an alternative proposal:

Any software or collection of software components used by people to create
or modify content, including but not limited to Web content authoring
tools, multimedia editing tools, word processors, and content management
systems, shall:
- allow the author to utilize all accessibility features defined by the
content format
- avoid deleting or altering any accessibility attributes that exist in the
content

with the following definitions:
content: any information that is encountered as part of a user experience
including but not limited to text, images, sounds, videos and animations
[4],
content format: an encoding mechanism for storing information. Examples are
HTML, JPEG, SMIL, PDF, others?

Comments?

[1]
http://teitac.org/wiki/Web_and_Software:content#Add_provisions_to_address_authoring_tools_and_user_agents
[2] http://teitac.org/wiki/Web_and_Software:_March_7
[3] http://teitac.org/wiki/Web_and_Software:_March_14
[4] adapted from Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_content

Andi

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