It has been almost a year since I tested accessibility features in some of the more popular WYSIWYG editors commonly found in open source content management systems (see Evaluation of WYSIWYG editors). During this time, most of these editors have been further developed. Let’s have a look at how they fare a year on.

Test method

The test method is the same as last time (to be able to see if scores changed compared to the previous test). In short, I tried to create a sample document in each of the editors. The sample document contains markup commonly found on the web. All editors were tested on the same date and the online demo version was used when available. If there was an option to enable more features, all were enabled.

Tested editors

Most of the editors from the previous test are included this time. Based on feedback from the comments I have also added a couple of new contestants.

From the previous test:

1. EditOnPro by Realobjects. Commercial license.
2. XStandard by Belus Technology. Commercial license. Lite version free (also see special license for open source CMS projects)
3. FCKeditor by Frederico Caldeira Knabben. Open source (LGPL), commercial license available.
4. CuteEditor by Cute Soft. Commercial license.
5. TinyMCE by Moxiecode. Open source (LGPL).
6. New: Xinha. Open source BSD-style license.
7. New: WYMeditor. Open source (MIT and GPL). For an introduction to WYMeditor see Visually Editing Semantics - What You See Is What You Mean.
8. New: Loki by Carleton College. Open source (GPL).

Missing from this round is Kupu as it has not come out with any new release since the previous test. Also, eWebEditPro could not be tested. The online demo gives an error: “Error loading mycontent1″.

Test result

The total score for each editor is listed below. For full test result details see here.

If you find error in the results, please leave a comment or send an e-mail to peter krantz at gmail.com.

Observations

• Many of the tested editors have implemented more accessibility features since the previous test. This is good.
• The bold and italics icons are still used when creating emphasis.
• TinyMCE is one of the few editors that doesn’t nest list items properly. According to the developer comment to my previous article there is an option to corrent this behaviour but it isn’t enabled by default for some reason. TinyMCE now has support for acronyms and abbreviations (with icons that are easy to understand). TinyMCE would have had a score of 18 if the nesting was fixed.
• XStandard is the only editor that pass all the tests.
• WYMeditor is a very interesting contender. Although in a very early stage of development (only two versions released) it managed to score 14 points. It is also the only editor that clearly displays to the user what type of markup is being edited.
• Loki is one of the few editors that has a proper icon for block quotes (it looks like a quote character).
• Only XStandard and TinyMCE provide functionality to create acronyms.

There are now more editors that provide functionality to do proper semantic markup. This is great! My guess is that it would be easy to add many of the remaining features (acronyms, abbreviations and inline quotes) to many of the editors.

Which one will you be selecting for your next project and why?

Many CMSs (content management systems) come with some kind of visual editor that allow editors to create and format content without knowing the markup involved. I evaluated some of these WYSISYG-editors back in March and found most of them lacking in features for semantic markup. One of the more commonly found problems is that they have a lot of features for visual formatting like font selection, font color, indentation etc. In most CMSs these are features you would like to avoid (ask your corporate communication department if they would like to have features that allow editors to go crazy with colors on the website…).

Som of you will argue that one should never use a WYSIWYG editor and instead deploy a wiki-style editing syntax like e.g. Markdown. This typically solves the problem, but in reality this type of syntax is very difficult for content editors to learn and becomes increasingly difficult if you want to do more advanced editing.

WYMeditor to the rescue

I was planning to start working on my own inline editor by forking TinyMCE and correcting what I thought was wrong with it when I found this comment from Jean-François:

[…] I’d like to present WYMeditor: WYMeditor is a web-based XHTML editor, not WYSIWYG, but WYSIWYM: the end-user can concentrate on rich content, while layout and design are handled via style-sheets.

This sounded almost too good to be true. WYSIWYM (What You See Is What You Mean) is of course how content for the web should be edited. WYMeditor is in an early stage of development, but after playing with it for a while it looks very promising. If it guarantees well formed XHTML it is an easy task to convert it to HTML 4.01 or any other representation you can think of.

Currently it works in Internet Explorer and Gecko-based browsers such as Firefox. You can try an online demo of WYMeditor here.

If content management systems were to use editors like WYMeditor web accessibility would get and instant boost. There are some issues that hopefully will be solved soon:

• icons for strong emphasis and emphasis look like bold and italics,
• heading levels can be mixed in a non-logical way (like inserting h5 after h1)
• support for som elements like acronym, abbreviation and definition lists, are missing

But, if I was developing a CMS I would definitely monitor the progress of WYMeditor.

Could WYMeditor make content editors aware of semantics in a way currently impossible in other inline editors? Will this type of inline editing merge with visual presentation à la XStandard?

A couple of days ago I released RAAKT - The Ruby Accessibility Analysis Kit gem (I know, it really needs a better name). RAAKT is a gem that can be used independently of Rails and my plan was to make a Rails plugin that would add a custom assert method that did the check. It turns out that it only takes five lines of code so there is no need for a plugin. So let’s see how you can integrate accessibility checks into your current Rails application.

Read more about Automated Accessibility Tests with RAAKT in Ruby on Rails

Web based editing tools are becoming standard issue in modern content managment systems. As more and more organizations discover the advantages of using strucured markup it is important that these editing tools allow editors to markup content without knowledge of HTML. Unfortunately, many of the WYSIWYG-editing tools in use today create invalid markup or do not have the functionality required. Therefore I have selected some web based editing tools and tried to create a sample document in each of them.
Read more about Evaluation of WYSIWYG-editors