[TYPO3-hci] Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)

[JoH]

> Is anyone familiar with this the Authoring Tool Accessibility
> Guidelines (ATAG)? I came across it this morning whilst doing some
> research on accessibility.
>
> http://www.w3.org/WAI/intro/atag.php
>
> The ATAG are a set of guidelines for authoring tool developers in both
> creating a tool which is accessible to disabled end users, and a tool
> which creates accessible web pages. It would seem that these guidlines
> are very relevant to this discussion.

Well - yes and no ;-)

The major problem with these kind of guidelines is, that they are sometimes
far beyond reality and that the overall usability of such a tool might be
decreased.
For example the WAI guidelines tell you to use access keys to make things
more accessible for disabled people, while just the contrary is the case,
since most of the blind people I know already use their own set of access
keys, that you can't know in advance.
So it might be relevant if we talk about an accessible version of the
backend, but this is not the case yet.

IMHO it's just impossible to implement all the features from the wishlist
and keep the current favourite features, while trying to create an
accessible backend at the same time.
AJAX, Clickmenus, drag and drop features and accessibility don't work
together very well.
So the only thing I could imagine is a separate version of the backend, that
takes care of those accessibility guidelines and can be enabled on demand.
So the default editors will get a fully blown feature-packed backend
monster, while there will be an additional accessible version with the
maximum number of possible features for this version.
Maybe the accessible version could be useful for people too who don't like
too much JavaScript tricks and prefer a streamlined version with just the
important features available.

So:
Yes these guidelines will be relevant for an accessible version of the BE
and
No they are not yet relevant for the overall usability discussion.

Joey

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