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

Published: 25 May 2023 Publication History

Abstract

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.

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  • (2025)Authoring Intelligent Educational Games with Fuzzy ReasoningArtificial Intelligence—Based Games as Novel Holistic Educational Environments to Teach 21st Century Skills10.1007/978-3-031-77464-5_7(203-233)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2025
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  1. Authoring tools are critical to the accessibility of the documents: Recommendations for word processors, including interaction design

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    DSAI '22: Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Software Development and Technologies for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion
    August 2022
    237 pages
    ISBN:9781450398077
    DOI:10.1145/3563137
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 25 May 2023

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    Author Tags

    1. ATAG
    2. WCAG
    3. accessibility
    4. authoring tools
    5. digital documents
    6. formats
    7. interaction design
    8. user interface

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    View all
    • (2025)Authoring Intelligent Educational Games with Fuzzy ReasoningArtificial Intelligence—Based Games as Novel Holistic Educational Environments to Teach 21st Century Skills10.1007/978-3-031-77464-5_7(203-233)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2025
    • (2025)Contributions and Discussions on Advancing 21st Century Skills Through EPATHLO: Prosocial Educational Games with Artificial IntelligenceArtificial Intelligence—Based Games as Novel Holistic Educational Environments to Teach 21st Century Skills10.1007/978-3-031-77464-5_10(277-309)Online publication date: 21-Jan-2025

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