Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)

Most people working in digital accessibility know about the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and how to assess and remediate web pages and documents to ensure that they are accessible. I've been working with WCAG for 6 years. Although I'd heard of ATAG, I didn't really know anything about it and I've never used it.

As I am now studying to take the International Association of Accessibility Professionals (IAAP) Web Accessibility Specialist (WAS) exam, I have to learn about ATAG.

What do I have to learn?

The Body of Knowledge requires candidates to understand and interpret ATAG. There are 6 learning objectives listed:

• Understand how ATAG 2.0 applies to web content authoring tools.
• Understand the meaning and intent of the two main sections of ATAG 2.0.
• Understand the intent, requirements, and impact of each principle, guideline, and success criterion.
• Distinguish between good, automated practices in authoring tools and good practices that require author/user input.
• Understand the power and limitations of automated accessibility authoring features.
• Understand the difference between normative and non-normative information in ATAG 2.0.

ATAG and Authoring Tools

An authoring tool is an application or web service that allows users to create content. The users who create the content have become authors. So the tool that they use to do this is an authoring tool. They can be web-based or non-web-based, and usually have many features to enable authors to not only create content but to format and style it too.

There are many different authoring tools that we use. Here are some of the ones I use or have used:

• Microsoft Word
• Articulate Rise
• Articulate Storyline
• Moodle/Totara
• Blogger
• Facebook
• Work intranets
• SharePoint
• Notepad++
• Adobe Premiere Pro

ATAG provides a framework to ensure that both the authoring tool interface and the content that is created are both accessible. It is structured in two parts to reflect this dual purpose.

Structure of ATAG

Sections

ATAG has two sections or parts. The first is about the interface that authors use when creating content. This interface needs to be accessible so that everyone can use it. The second part is about the content that is created or published. This is partly dependent on the author but there are things that the authoring tool can and should do to make it easier to get this right.

1. Part A: Make the authoring tool user interface accessible
2. Part B: Support the production of accessible content

Principles

There are 4 principles in each section. These provide high-level organisation for the guidelines.

Guidelines

The guidelines provide the framework and objectives for the success criteria. There are 24 guidelines altogether.

Success Criteria

The success criteria are the requirements that have to be met. There are 63 success criteria altogether and, like the WCAG success criteria, they cover 3 levels:

• A - 24 criteria
• AA - 15 criteria
• AAA - 11 criteria

The remaining 13 criteria cover all three levels, depending on which WCAG level they correspond to.