As you know, there is no one checkbox labelled “accessibility” to be ticked off.

Instead, there are a lot of individual decisions to be made, particularly as the richness of site functionality grows.

Authors also have to have the necessary skills, time and interest to deliver accessible content.

At the end of the day, we need to improve both sides of the coin:

* the capabilities of publishing tools

* the internal people processes

Cheers, James

What’s interesting to note is how little most CMS client teams actually know about accessibility, even when they know it’s a priority for their deployment.

I work for Ephox and we’ve been talking with a lot of clients about accessibility and how to make it easier for the average author to create accessible content. It’s certainly not easy to get authors to understand the impact of even simple things like alt text. It’s one thing to require alt text, it’s quite another to ensure that you get something useful as that text.

Even with our editor automatically cleaning up code pasted from MS Word, providing an accessibility report built right into the editor and really strong support for applying CSS stylings from a predefined stylesheet rather than inline, it’s still quite common for people to create inaccessible content. Mostly, the average author doesn’t care about accessbility, even if the team maintaining the CMS do and that’s not easy to fix.

Fortunately, as more people demand better accessibility and actually look under the hood as you recommend, vendors will be under more pressure and will actually start scheduling development cycles to improve things. It’s certainly an area that Ephox has always paid a lot of attention to and will be paying even more to in the future – our next release is focussed almost entirely on making it easier to create accessible content.