DRAFT Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group Charter

The mission of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (ATAG WG) is to produce guidelines for the development of authoring tools that are accessible to authors with disabilities and enable the creation of accessible content for end users. The group develops the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) and support materials.

Join the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group.

This draft charter is available on GitHub. Feel free to raise issues.

Charter Status See the group status page and detailed change history.
Start date [dd monthname yyyy] (date of the "Call for Participation", when the charter is approved)
End date [dd monthname yyyy] (Start date + 2 years)
Chairs [chair name] (affiliation) (Remember that Listing W3C-Member organizations names is a W3C Member benefit. Non-W3C-Member (co)-Chair(s) are to be affiliated as 'W3C Invited Expert'.)
Team Contacts
Meeting Schedule Teleconferences: weekly
In-person: we will meet during the W3C's annual Technical Plenary week; additional in-person meetings may be scheduled by consent of the participants, usually no more than 3 per year.
See also this group calendar

Motivation and Background

Web accessibility depends on several components working together. These components include content, user agents, assistive technology, authoring tools, evaluation tools, users, and developers.

To realize a web for all people, fundamental to Ethical Web Principles, the tools used to create content must be accessible to people with disabilities.

Furthermore, when authoring tools support accessibility, content developers spend less effort to produce more accessible content. Thus, accessibility improvements in authoring tools have an exponential effect on improving content accessibility.

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group defined the standard Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 1.0 in 2000 and ATAG 2.0 in 2015. The group closed in 2015 after completion of ATAG 2.0.

Since then, WCAG 2.1 and 2.2 have been published, WCAG 3 is being developed, and the landscape of authoring tools and platforms has notably changed. This includes the rise of artificial intelligence and Large Language Models (LLM) in content creation, and the increased use of API-driven, headless, and web-based platforms for content development and consumption.

The Accessibility Guidelines Working Group will explore these developments, and develop up-to-date specifications and support materials that assist authoring tool developers in designing authoring tools that:

Scope

The Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group (ATAG WG) plans to explore the following topics with the goal of developing an update to the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG):

Out of Scope

The following features are out of scope, and will not be addressed by this Working Group:

  • Standards for the accessibility of content

Deliverables

Updated document status is available on the group publication status page.

Normative Specifications

The Working Group will deliver the following W3C normative specification:

Next version of the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG)

This specification will provide updated guidelines for designing content authoring tools that enable, support, and promote the production of content that is more accessible to people with disabilities. This version will consider the new landscape for authoring tools and the role of the user in accessible production, maintenance, and consumption of content.

Draft state: [No draft | Use Cases and Requirements | Editor's Draft | W3C-Member Submission]

Expected completion: [Q1–4 yyyy]

If this is a new technical report that will start as a copy of a different TR:

Initial Text: The title, stable URL, and publication date of the existing technical report which will serve as the initial text of the deliverable.

Otherwise, if there is an existing Exclusion Draft, use the [current spec name] template below instead.

The Working Group will maintain the following W3C normative specification:

Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines (ATAG) 2.0

This specification provides guidelines for designing web content authoring tools that are more accessible to people with disabilities. An authoring tool that conforms to these guidelines will promote accessibility by providing an accessible user interface to authors with disabilities as well as enabling, supporting, and promoting the production of accessible web content by all authors. Maintenance for ATAG 2.0 will focus on addressing any outdated references, definitions, or informative content in the specification.

Other Deliverables

Other non-normative documents may be created such as:

  • Use case and requirement documents;
  • Test suite and implementation report for the specification;
  • Primer or best practice documents to support web developers when designing applications.

Timeline

Put here a timeline view of all deliverables.

  • Month YYYY: First teleconference
  • Month YYYY: First face-to-face meeting
  • Month YYYY: Requirements and Use Cases for FooML
  • Month YYYY: FPWD for FooML
  • Month YYYY: Requirements and Use Cases for BarML
  • Month YYYY: FPWD FooML Primer

Success Criteria

In order to advance beyond Candidate Recommendation, each normative specification is expected to have at least two independent interoperable implementations of every feature defined in the specification, where interoperability can be verified by passing open test suites. In order to advance beyond Candidate Recommendation, each normative specification must have an open test suite of every feature defined in the specification.

There should be testing plans for each specification, starting from the earliest drafts.

Each specification should contain separate sections detailing all known security and privacy implications for implementers, Web authors, and users.

Each specification should contain a section on accessibility that describes the benefits and impacts, including ways specification features can be used to address them, and recommendations for maximising accessibility in implementations.

This group is expected to be guided by the following documents:

Coordination

For all specifications, this Working Group will seek horizontal review for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security with the relevant Working and Interest Groups, and with the TAG. Invitation for review must be issued during each major standards-track document transition, including FPWD. The Working Group is encouraged to engage collaboratively with the horizontal review groups throughout development of each specification. The Working Group is advised to seek a review at least 3 months before first entering CR and is encouraged to proactively notify the horizontal review groups when major changes occur in a specification following a review.

Additional technical coordination with the following Groups will be made, per the W3C Process Document:

W3C Groups

Accessibility Guidelines (AG) Working Group
The ATAG Working Group will liaise with the AG Working Group to ensure that the guidance in ATAG is consistent with the latest developments in Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2 and WCAG 3.
Internationalization Working Group
The ATAG Working Group will coordinate with the Internationalization Working Group to ensure guidance is consistent with the authoring requirements or best practices of different languages and scripts.
Publishing Maintenance Working Group
The ATAG Working Group will coordinate with the Publishing Maintenance Working Group to ensure guidance is inclusive of use cases in the publishing ecosystem and reflects the requirements or best practices for digital publishing.
Media Working Group
The ATAG Working Group will coordinate with the Media Working Group to ensure guidance is inclusive of use cases in the media ecosystem and reflects the requirements or best practices for media production.
Audio Working Group
The ATAG Working Group will coordinate with the Audio Working Group to ensure guidance is inclusive of use cases in the media ecosystem and reflects the requirements or best practices for media production.
Timed Text Working Group
The ATAG Working Group will coordinate with the Timed Text Working Group to ensure guidance is inclusive of use cases in the media ecosystem and reflects the requirements or best practices for media production.

External Organizations

Accessibility Standards Canada (ASC)

The ATAG Working Group will liaise with ASC on the development of accessibility standards for authoring tools.

Note: The W3C Team is considering a memorandum of understanding (MoU) for a joint W3C-ASC standard.

Participation

To be successful, this Working Group is expected to have 6 or more active participants for its duration, including representatives from the key implementors of this specification, and active Editors and Test Leads for each specification. The Chairs, specification Editors, and Test Leads are expected to contribute half of a working day per week towards the Working Group. There is no minimum requirement for other Participants.

The group encourages questions, comments and issues on its public mailing lists and document repositories, as described in Communication. The group also welcomes non-participants to make technical contributions for ongoing work, provided they agree to the terms of the W3C Patent Policy.

The Chairs should periodically look through the non-W3C-Member contributors to the Working Group or the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Community Group and consider whether each one should be invited to participate as an Invited Expert. If a non-W3C-Member contributor would like to participate in meetings, they are encouraged to apply to be an Invited Expert.

Participants in the group are required (by the W3C Process) to follow the W3C Code of Conduct.

Communication

Technical discussions for this Working Group are conducted in public: the meeting minutes from teleconference and face-to-face meetings will be archived for public review, and technical discussions and issue tracking will be conducted in a manner that can be both read and written to by the general public. Working Drafts and Editor's Drafts of specifications will be developed in public repositories and may permit direct public contribution requests. The meetings themselves are not open to public participation, however.

Information about the group (including details about deliverables, issues, actions, status, participants, and meetings) will be available from the Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group home page.

Most Authoring Tool Accessibility Guidelines Working Group teleconferences will focus on discussion of particular specifications, and will be conducted on an as-needed basis.

This group primarily conducts its technical work pick one, or both, as appropriate: on the public mailing list public-atag-wg@w3.org (archive) or on GitHub issues. The public is invited to review, discuss and contribute to this work.

The group may use a Member-only mailing list for administrative purposes and, at the discretion of the Chairs and members of the group, for member-only discussions in special cases when a participant requests such a discussion.

Decision Policy

This group will seek to make decisions through consensus and due process, per the W3C Process Document (section 5.2.1, Consensus). Typically, an editor or other participant makes an initial proposal, which is then refined in discussion with members of the group and other reviewers, and consensus emerges with little formal voting being required.

However, if a decision is necessary for timely progress and consensus is not achieved after careful consideration of the range of views presented, the Chairs may call for a group vote and record a decision along with any objections.

To afford asynchronous decisions and organizational deliberation, any resolution (including publication decisions) taken in a face-to-face meeting or teleconference will be considered provisional. A call for consensus (CfC) will be issued for all resolutions (for example, via email, GitHub issue or web-based survey), with a response period from 5-10 working days, depending on the chair's evaluation of the group consensus on the issue. If no objections are raised by the end of the response period, the resolution will be considered to have consensus as a resolution of the Working Group.

All decisions made by the group should be considered resolved unless and until new information becomes available or unless reopened at the discretion of the Chairs.

This charter is written in accordance with the W3C Process Document (Section 5.2.3, Deciding by Vote) and includes no voting procedures beyond what the Process Document requires.

Patent Policy

This Working Group operates under the W3C Patent Policy (Version of 15 May 2025). To promote the widest adoption of Web standards, W3C seeks to issue Web specifications that can be implemented, according to this policy, on a Royalty-Free basis. For more information about disclosure obligations for this group, please see the licensing information.

Licensing

This Working Group will use the W3C Document license for all its deliverables.

About this Charter

This charter has been created according to section 3.4 of the Process Document. In the event of a conflict between this document or the provisions of any charter and the W3C Process, the W3C Process shall take precedence.

Charter History

The following table lists details of all changes from the initial charter, per the W3C Process Document (section 4.3, Advisory Committee Review of a Charter):

Charter Period Start Date End Date Changes
New charter [dd monthname yyyy] [dd monthname yyyy]
Previous charters 19 December 1997 5 November 2015

Change log

Changes to this document are documented in this section.