Re: Standards based, accessible HTML textarea editor?

On Wed, 19 Nov 2003 11:26:13 +0000, Jim Byrne wrote:
> Does anyone know of a tool that I could incorporate within my existing web
> browser based, PHP Content Management System, that would help non-technical
> users add content to a site in a standards based, accessible way?

There are a lot out that will produce code to standards (XHTML), but none 
that can guarantee accessible output - it's impossible.

We have found that the best route is to restrict the options that the users 
have so that you don't let them change fonts/colours but do let them to apply 
pre set styles.


Even if you bolt the users down to the bare minimum, there is nothing to stop 
them not entering proper alt tags on images, summaries to tables or even 
incorrectly using blockquotes, bold and italics.

The main problems we encounter are misuse of bold and italics and users not 
using the standard html formatting tags (<p>, <h1>, <h2>, etc) properly.

The other things to bear in mind are:

Make sure you get an editor that does a good job of cleaning up the html that 
you get from MS Word.

The chances are that the actual editor you use won't be accessible - this is 
something that we are struggling with at the moment.


Having said all that, we use eWebEditPro by Ektron.  It is pricey, but it is 
highly configurable and has excellent facilities for cleaning MS Word content 
- we use it with ASP.Net, but it should work with your PHP.

Cheers,

Julian Voelcker
Cirencester, United Kingdom

Received on Wednesday, 19 November 2003 07:45:20 UTC