Content creators want automatic accessibility checks
Channel: Drupal 4 Gov
Date: 07/11/2023

John Jameson

Developers and designers who care about accessibility have a lot to learn, and the tools to check their code need to be intense: WAVE, AXE, MS Insights, HTML CodeSniffer...browser plugins and pushbutton tools rightly brag about the number of tests and visualizers they provide.

But what about content creators?

New-to-accessibility content creators often express nervousness about their content ("I just don't know if it is accessible"), and experienced creators often still feel overwhelmed:

1.) Comprehensive checkers are complicated! Users need to be told to find, install and use them, and then trained to understand the feedback they provide: which highlighted issues are real and which are false positives, which are real but not their problem ("Oh; yeah that's a theme issue; we have an open ticket about that; just ignore it...").

2) Drupal-provided tools are generally manual: "Want to check your CKEditor content? Great! Just edit the page, scroll to the "body" field, then click the accessibility button in the toolbar..."

3) Automated quality assurance services are generally based on crawlers and dashboards. Site owners are expected to set aside time to check their dashboard and take action. This often falls through the cracks!

We'll tour some of these tools and some inline quality assurance techniques, and then demo "Editoria11y" -- an automatic, in-context checker designed to bring the "it just works" expectations for spellcheck to content accessibility.

Link to slides: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JWU_RIxHQ1C6S6cnbhcvPgLBXvbWpiWTHD-mETZhYy0/edit#slide=id.g133b8afe5d2_0_281