Accessibility of Text Editors

Over the years there have been improvements in the accessibilty of text editors but there is still a need to evaluate which aspects of the menus can be easily reached and where there remain barriers for screen reader and keyboard only users. The University of Illinois Library Accessibility First group provided the outcomes of their meeting in April 2016 on the Accessible Text Editor Options and the decision was to update their own accessible text editor A11y First Text Editor which highlights the issues that still remain with these online word processors.

Checks for  keyboard access and tab order have been discussed  in relation to forms. However, even if certain keyboard shortcuts can be implemented once the user has landed within the editor, such as Ctrl+B for bold text, there remain limitations to total access in many editors.

The sample editor below can be configured in many ways as shown in the documentation provided by ckeditor

One point to remember when working with these types of editors – if you copy and paste text directly from Microsoft Word you may find there are times when your text has all sorts of small marks or oddities creeping in.  This is because the markup language that is used by Microsoft Word is not necessarily recognised by the browser.  Typical examples are the inverted commas (curly speech marks) or extra spaces becoming question marks in a diamond!