Compliance
Impact of New Accessibility Standards on Authoring Tools
September 22, 2017 | Written by: Michael Gower
Categorized: Compliance
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There are new provisions in the 2017 revised U.S. Section 508 standards, as well as European requirements, that are creating additional focus on the accessibility of authoring tools.
We wanted to provide guidance for anyone seeking to understand how the new standards define authoring tools, and requirements for helping ensure accessibility.
What is an Authoring Tool?
The revised Section 508 standards define an authoring tool as: “Any software, or collection of software components, that can be used by authors, alone or collaboratively, to create or modify content for use by others, including other authors.”
Simply put, a software product whose primary job is to create content for publication is an authoring tool.
Products such as InDesign, Dreamweaver and Premiere fall into this category. Similarly, software that creates documentation or applications (whether for web, mobile or non-web) is an authoring tool. Eclipse and other development suites fit here, as do wiki applications.
However, there [...]