Authoring tools are critical to the accessibility of the documents: Recommendations for word processors, including interaction design

Of all the digital documents that are published daily, only part of them are accessible to people with disabilities or temporary or situational disabilities or functional diversity. This contravenes the growing interest and legal pressure to produce accessible content. Three agents are involved in the production of a digital document; the digital format of the document, the authoring tool that creates the content according to the potential of said format and, finally, the author of the document. The most widespread digital formats (ODF, PDF/UA or HTML) offer the elements to potentially create documents with a high degree of accessibility, and therefore the attention should be directed to the authoring tools and the authors of the documents. The latter should be accounted for relevant elements in accessibility as the use of plain language or clarity in the presentation; however, authoring tools are primarily responsible for producing accessible documents. ATAG provides recommendations for authoring tools, but they are general (they apply to all authoring tools) and do not include any interaction requirements. This study proposes 15 recommendations that could provide a second level of depth in the requirements of authoring tools customized to word processors and that also include recommendations on the interaction design. To do this, the article classifies the different items that can be found in textual documents, starting from books as a superset of any textual document; subsequently, it describes the main barriers users face according to their functional diversity. The final result, based on the classification of the elements and the different ways of accessing the content, are 15 recommendations for textual documents authoring tools.